A tasty dish

The book is a re-issue of the original Taschen version from 2011. I hope no other publisher is thinking of doing a book on menu design because Jim Heimann's wonderful collection in this title can't be beat. With almost eight hundred covers and nicely, many showing the insides so you can see what was available when your folks ate out decades ago.

It's the inside meal listings that I found intriguing: the Palmer House in Chicago, on May 17, 1885, offered Fried frogs, a la Crapotine; when the Iowa Register and Tribune papers had their banquet in 1917 they could tuck into Dross smothered in onions; United States Lines SS America on Monday June 9, 1930 listed a dessert called Blanc mange; the Sea Cave in Oakland, California, had thirty-three oyster dishes and claimed `We open our oysters daily'.

Little snippets of information pop up everywhere. The 1943 San Diego Red Sails Inn menu said 'We are closed on Tuesdays', because of wartime regulations required meatless Tuesdays. The Disney Studio in 1942 had very low prices for breakfast, in the staff canteen, to prevent their workers going of the lot. Many of the menus before 1940 have daily dates printed on them, presumably they were frown away when the places closed at night. All the up-market menus used a mixture of French and English though the swanky New York Colony in 1954 had every thing in French and handwritten, too.

The menus included aren't just restaurants but from anywhere that provided cooked food, the Colony to Bob's Big Boy and everything in between, no early McDonalds though. The covers come in all sorts of sizes and shapes, a few shown include location maps and I found one that featured photographs of the meals.

The book is the usual well designed Taschen format. Good page layouts and printing with a 150 screen. I would have preferred to see a gloss paper to bring out the wonderful colorful graphics rather than the slightly soft matt art that has been used.

Jim Heinmann's book will be a treat for those in the food business and graphic designers will appreciate all the amazing visual goodies. This is his second title on the subject, check out May I Take Your Order? a nicely designed large paperback from 1998.

Away from it all dreams that became real

The houses in this book are a good test of an architect's ability to work outside the normal commercial constraints and concentrate more on the environment and supplying non-commercial utilities. Looking through the book's 310 photos it's clear that lots of clever solutions have been created to provide a simple living experience or in some cases minimal luxury ones, I spotted an Eames chair in one house, Mies de Rohe's Barcelona chair in another and architect Malcolm Davis installed a solar heated outside pool for a property in Sonoma County, California (and I couldn't see a TV or sat dish in any of the book's photos).

What I liked about the book is very wide selection of houses the author has chosen from Henning Larsen's Granja Experimental Alnardo, a very contemporary looking farmhouse in Spain that seems quite large to what is basically one-bed transparent cabins designed by Jeanna Berger on a private Swedish island, all the materials had to be brought in by boat.

The Introduction sets out the various options for living off-grid: respect for the environment, focusing on renewable sources of energy, landscaping and using timber for construction. One of the joys of living in these houses is the ability to merge into the natural environment and so many of them have large expanses of glass but with triple glazing that cuts down on heat loss.

The houses are divided into three chapters: Countryside and forest; Hillside and mountains; Waterside and coast. They are the work of forty-three architectural practices mostly in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand (email addresses are provided). The back of the book has eight pages with a comprehensive listing of what to consider if you are contemplating off-grid living.

The owners of these wonderful houses have shown it's possible to escape from everyday city and urban living and enjoy nature instead.

US

Off the Grid: Houses for Escape: Bradbury, Dominic: 9780500021422: Amazon.com: Books

UK

Off the Grid: Houses for Escape: Amazon.co.uk: Bradbury, Dominic: 9780500021422: Books

　

 
 

　

　

　

　

　

Great Steel City shots in a poor format

Elliott Erwitt was only twenty-two when Roy Stryker (formerly boss of the FSA Photo Division during the Depression and early war years) asked him to come to Pittsburgh in 1950 to join a small group of photographers under Stryker's direction. He had been commissioned by Allegheny Conference on Community Development to capture a modern Pittsburgh rising from the steel heavy city of past decades. Of the ten in the group Erwitt was the second youngest and certainly the least well known among others like Esther Bubley, Harold Cosini, Arnold Eagle, Russell Lee, and Sol Libsohn.

Oddly, for a photographer Erwitt didn't drive (he came from New York on a Greyhound bus) so he walked around the city and this enabled him to take photos of gritty streets and the people who lived in them. The pictures are full of blacks and dark greys and actually show very little of a changing Pittsburgh but others in Strykers team did capture the new city which is best revealed in a beautiful looking book: Witness to the fifties: the Pittsburgh photographic library 1950-1953 (ISBN 0822941112) with more than a hundred photos including fifteen by Erwitt.

This is a wonderful selection of Erwitt's photos (with about eighty) but unfortunately the book's layout is very poor. The images bleed off the page in different sizes in an attempt create visual interest which isn't necessary with photos this good. In two cases photos are butted together into the book's spine. The Witness... title I mentioned above looks good because, although the photos are different sizes, they are all centred on the page with generous margins and a caption. Another annoyance with the GOST book is that all the captions are on one back page so the reader has to flip backwards and forwards.