Dirt cheap

It's only when you look through the hundreds of photos in this large book that you'll realize that building with earth is very environmentally friendly and obviously extremely cost-efficient. Worth saying right away though that this is not a DIY book on how to build a simple house for yourself (the six page bibliography probably has something about that) but rather a comprehensive overview of the history and recent developments in earth-building around the world.

Chapter one (Construction logic) explains how earth buildings have stood for centuries because of fairly simple scientific principles like gravity, electrostatic forces and capillary cohesion, these combined with the load-bearing features of wood enable structures several stories high to stand for years. In chapter three there are photos of the remarkable town of Shiban in central Yemen, entirely earth built with buildings up to five or six stories. A cross-section illustration shows that the walls are much thicker at the base and gradually taper nearer the roof. In Iran the Citadel of Bam, the largest adobe building in the world had stood for centuries until an earthquake in 2003 almost destroyed it. Chapter two provides plenty of historical visual evidence that earth and clay had been used around the world to build large towns.

There is extensive coverage of earth, adobe, wattle and cob for buildings in various parts of the world and in particular, Africa (Egypt, Mali and Morocco have the most entries in the country index) where earth has always been the traditional way to make a house and basically by hand. Many photos show a rough textured uneven finish to all the outside walls and decorative elements in the rooms. In complete contrast, the world's first museum built from earth was opened in Mali in the late 1970s, constructed from rammed earth bricks. Chapter six (Contemporary Creativity) has a selection of housing and civic buildings in various countries, using earth as the basic building unit but now including metal, wood and glass so that the end result looks like a conventional brick structure but much cheaper.

Anyone interested in alternative environmental building solutions will find this a fascinating book. Jean Dethier, the Editor, selected a scientific committee and other experts to check the relevance of the material in the book which is backed up with seven hundred photos (mostly in color) and more than a hundred diagrams. The large images and straightforward presentation all contribute to a worthwhile study of earth architecture.

Rooms for everyone

A worthwhile reprint of Bradbury's 2012 edition and slightly updated with the addition of three house interiors (and it's called a compact edition but it's only around five centimetres less on the width and depth). The thing that almost all the interiors have in common is space and how it's creatively used in each room to reflect the house owner's living ideals.

The rooms are presented historically from Edith Wharton's 1902 Mount House in Massachusetts up to the 2018 Commune designed Berkeley House in San Francisco and worth saying that a third of the hundred and three house interiors are in the US, the remainder are scattered around the world though mostly in Europe. The format for each house starts with a quite comprehensive essay on the various rooms and how the actual structure could influence the way furniture and fittings are positioned. A good example of this is British designer David Pocknell's 2007 barn conversion to a home and office, planning regulations had to be taken into account as well as supporting beams, seven photos reveal the designer's clever solution. John Lautner's 1962 Garcia House in LA has a huge vaulted roof that flows over the whole structure creating sloping ceilings in several rooms, nine photos, over two spreads, show how cosy the rooms look.

Living rooms provide the big photos for each interior (with several showing those tables displaying mini stacks of thick cultural books) and smaller ones for bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms usually over two spreads. Oddly Dieter Rams has his interiors summed up with three photos on one spread (maybe less is more) and Eduardo Longo's 1979 Casa Bola in Sao Paulo is another oddity because it's a sphere, another example of how the structure dictates the arrangement of the living areas.

I enjoyed looking through the six hundred photos in the book and because the past and presents owners generally reflect a cultural or creative persona the design solutions are extremely varied and visually quite stimulating. Rooms here for everyone.

Over priced, over produced PR for a major label

The excellent Capitol fiftieth anniversary book, you can look inside it here:

https://westread.blogspot.com/2020/02/capitol-records-fiftieth-anniversary.html

What an odd Taschen publication, from the carrying case (it's that heavy) and unnecessary foldout jacket to the 492-page book basically full of large publicity shots of Capitol recording artists. The first five chapters have text that breezily skips over the company's history each followed by pages and pages of stock star photos. The back of the book has the most interesting material. Design historian Alan Hess writes a quite detailed piece on the architecture of the Capitol Tower and Sean Wilentz covers the famous recording studios.

The last fourteen pages feature seventy-five of the company's best albums as decided by an unnamed advisory panel and illustrated with mostly rather bland covers. Strangely these are the only covers in the book, Capitol for years had beautiful LP covers (and well-designed backs, too) but the book's editors decided to go with photos throughout the book.

For those who want a more thorough history of this famous label, you'll have to search out the large size, 220-page Capitol's fiftieth-anniversary book. A sumptuous title full of articles, photos, covers and exuberant graphics that was given away free in 1992 (a few copies of the hardback and paperback can still be found on the net).

I think this Taschen book was heavily subsidized by Capitol as a PR exercise, how many young adults who buy the company's music would pay such a high price for this chunky book?