American Homes: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Domestic Architecture

Front Cover
Black Dog & Leventhal, 1981 - Architecture - 333 pages
A landmark of architectural history, AMERICAN HOMES surveys over 100 American housing styles and illustrates them through nearly 1000 line drawings. Using his own unique combination of "exploded" diagrams and floor plans and easy-to-follow text, award-winning architect and author Lester Walker has created the definitive bible of home design, fully practical but wonderful, too, for armchair browsing and dreaming.

Walker describes each style's signature features, and how, where, when, and why the style developed in response to the landscape. The full evolution of American residential architecture is represented, including Dutch Colonials, Log cabins, Southern plantation mansions, Carpenter Gothics, Neo-modern styles, and more.

For anyone who has ever designed or owned a home--or just lived in one--AMERICAN HOMES is the quintessential reference to our country's dwellings, past, present, and future.

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About the author (1981)

Lester Walker is an award-winning architect and author of numerous books related to houses and architecture, including Little House of My Own, Housebuilding for Children and Block Building for Children. He has been a professor of architecture at City College of New York and has lectured and presented seminars at Harvard, MIT, UCLA, and the Rhode Island School of Design. His work has appeared in such magazines as House Beautiful, Time, House and Garden, Life, and Progressive Architecture. He lives in Woodstock, New York, where his architectural firm is based.

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