Sources

This book is the story of an education, and I had many teachers in addition to Charles Myer and Joe Benney. William Cronon gave me a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wisconsin that was eye-opening. James Evangelisti at Craftsman Woodshops taught me a great deal about wood and woodworking. Everyone at Northwest Lumber was consistently helpful and patient in answering my questions about materials, no matter how ignorant.

And then there were all the books, dozens of which were recommended, and lent to me, by Charlie. Listed below, by chapter, are the principal works referred to in the text, as well as others that influenced my thinking and building.

Chapter 1: A Room of One’s Own

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986).

Walker, Lester. Tiny Houses (Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1987).

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harvest, 1989).

Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Natural House (New York: Meridian Books, 1954).

Chapter 2: The Site

For Lewis Mumford’s discussion of the siting of houses in America, see Roots of Contemporary American Architecture (New York: Dover, 1972).

There’s an excellent summary of picturesque landscape theory in The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses, by James Ackerman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Also useful are William Howard Adams’s Nature Perfected: Gardens Through History (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991) and The Poetics of Gardens by Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, Jr. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).

 

My information on fêng shui comes mainly from The Living Earth Manual of Feng-Shui by Stephen Skinner (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) and The Feng-Shui Handbook by Derek Walters (London: HarperCollins, 1991). I also profited from an interview with William Spear, a fêng shui doctor and the author of Feng Shui Made Easy (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995).

 

For further reading on environmental psychology and landscape aesthetics, see:

 

Appleton, Jay. The Symbolism of Habitat (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990).

Kellert, Stephen R., and E. O. Wilson. The Biophilia Hypothesis (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993).

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).

Wilson, E. O. Biophilia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

Chapter 3: On Paper

All of Christopher Alexander’s books are worth reading, but the best known and most useful to the builder are:

 

Alexander, Christopher, et al. A Pattern Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

——. The Timeless Way of Building (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

 

The awards issue of Progressive Architecture I describe is January 1992.

 

The classic account of the primitive hut myth in architecture is Joseph Rykwert’s On Adam’s House in Paradise (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981).

 

Also see the essay on Marc-Antoine Laugier (don’t miss the plates) in Anthony Vidler’s The Writing on the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987) and Laugier’s An Essay on Architecture, translated by Wolfgang and Anni Hermann (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1977).

 

Any exploration of postmodern “literary” architecture must begin with Venturi’s two groundbreaking manifestos, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966) and, with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972).

 

For an introduction to the architecture and writing of Peter Eisenman see Re: Working Eisenman (London: Academy Editions, 1993). Be sure to read his correspondence with Jacques Derrida. You can also find his writings in almost any issue of ANY: Architecture New York, a bimonthly broadsheet journal published out of his office and edited by his wife.

 

Sophisticated critiques of the “linguistic turn” in architecture are hard to come by. I found these three persuasive and useful:

 

Benedikt, Michael. Deconstructing the Kimbell: An Essay on Meaning and Architecture (New York: SITES/Lumen Books, 1991).

——. For an Architecture of Reality (New York: Lumen Books, 1987).

Shepheard, Paul. What Is Architecture? An Essay on Landscapes, Buildings, and Machines (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

Chapter 4: Footings

The best writing about the importance of the ground, and the horizontal, in American architecture is by the architectural historian Vincent Scully. See American Architecture and Urbanism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969); Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); and The Shingle Style and the Stick Style (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). See also the discussion of Walden and Fallingwater in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization by Robert Pogue Harrison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

 

Wright’s own comments on the ground are drawn from The Natural House (op. cit., Chapter 1) and The Future of Architecture (New York: Horizon Press, 1953).

 

There’s a useful discussion of foundations and wood in A Good House by Richard Manning (New York: Grove Press, 1993) and a great riff on concrete by Peter Schjeldahl, “Hard Truths About Concrete,” in the October 1993 Harper’s Magazine. Mark Wigley offers a close reading of architectural metaphors in Western philosophy in The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).

Chapter 5: Framing

Frank Lloyd Wright’s discussion of the origins of architecture and the role of trees is in The Future of Architecture (op. cit., Chapter 4).

 

My account of the origins of balloon framing and its environmental significance draws on William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). For the social history of timber framing in America (including the evergreen ritual) I relied on John Stilgoe’s Common Landscape of America, 1580–1845 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Everyone who writes on the social meaning of building methods in America owes a large debt to the essays of the late J. B. Jackson. See The Necessity for Ruins (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts, 1980) and Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).

 

Hannah Arendt’s account of homo faber, and the distinctions between work and labor, appear in The Human Condition (New York: Doubleday, 1959).

 

For a wonderful discussion of shame and sacrifice rituals, see Frederick Turner’s The Culture of Hope (New York: Free Press, 1995).

Chapter 6: The Roof

As much of this chapter took place in the library as up on the roof. Here’s a partial list of my readings on roofness and architectural theory:

Alexander, Christopher, and Peter Eisenman. “Contrasting Concepts of Harmony: A Debate” in Lotus International (1983). This is the text of a fascinating, and heated, public debate held at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Argyros, Alexander J. A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).

Benedikt, Michael. Deconstructing the Kimbell and For an Architecture of Reality (op. cit., Chapter 3).

——, ed. “Buildings and Reality: Architecture in the Age of Information,” a special issue of Center: A Journal for Architecture in America (New York: Rizzoli, 1988).

Bloomer, Kent C., and Charles W. Moore. Body, Memory, and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

Cronon, William. “Inconstant Unity: The Passion of Frank Lloyd Wright,” in Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect, Terence Riley, ed. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994).

Crowe, Norman. Nature and the Idea of a Man-Made World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).

Eisenman, Peter. Re: Working Eisenman (op. cit., Chapter 3).

Ford, Edward R. The Details of Modern Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).

——. The Details of Modern Architecture, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).

Frampton, Kenneth. Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).

Frank, Suzanne. Peter Eisenman’s House VI: The Client’s Response (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1994).

Hildebrand, Grant. The Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Houses (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991).

Jackson, J. B. Landscapes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970). His description of Grand Central Station is on page 83.

Kahn, Louis. Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn (Boulder: Shambhala, 1979).

Lyndon, Donlyn, and Charles W. Moore. Chambers for a Memory Palace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

Norberg-Schultz, Christian. Architecture: Meaning and Place (New York: Rizzoli, 1988).

——. Genius Loci: Toward a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980).

——. New World Architecture (New York: The Architectural League of New York, 1988).

Rasmussen, Steen Eiler. Experiencing Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1959).

Rudofsky, Bernard. Architecture Without Architects (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987).

Rykwert, Joseph. On Adam’s House in Paradise (op. cit., Chapter 3).

Schwartz, Frederic, ed. Mother’s House: The Evolution of Vanna Venturi’s House in Chestnut Hill (New York: Rizzoli, 1992).

Scully, Vincent. The Shingle Style Today, or The Historian’s Revenge (New York: George Braziller, 1974). His discussion of the taboo against pitched roofs appears on page 15.

Shepheard, Paul. What Is Architecture? (op. cit., Chapter 3).

Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas (op. cit., Chapter 3).

——. Iconography and Electronics: Upon a Generic Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).

Vidler, Anthony. The Writing of the Walls (op. cit., Chapter 3).

——. The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).

Vitruvius. The Ten Books of Architecture, translated by Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover, 1960). His description of architectural evolution appears in “Origin of the Dwelling House,” pages 38–41.

Wigley, Mark. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (op. cit., Chapter 4).

See also The Cedar Shake and Shingle Bureau Design and Application Manual (Farmingdale, New York).

Chapter 7: Windows

On the history of the idea of transparency in the West, I relied on Richard Sennett’s The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). Also helpful on the subject of glass in architecture were Robert Hughes, in his terrific chapter on modern architecture in The Shock of the New (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), and Reyner Banham’s The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (London: The Architectural Press, 1969). See also John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (London: BBC & Penguin, 1972) and Norman Bryson’s Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).

By far the most provocative article I’ve read on windows is Neil Levine’s “Questioning the View: Seaside’s Critique of the Gaze of Modern Architecture” in Seaside: Making a Town in America, edited by David Mohney and Keller Easterling (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991). See also the chapter on transparency in Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny (op. cit., Chapter 6) and, though I don’t claim to understand all of it, Colin Rowe’s seminal essay (with Robert Slutzky) “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal” in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976).

Chapter 8: Finish Work

On the place of time in architecture, see:

 

Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn (New York: Viking, 1994).

Jackson, J. B. A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

Johnson, Philip. “Whence and Whither: The Processional Element in Architecture,” in David Whitney and Jeffrey Kipnis, eds. Philip Johnson: The Glass House (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993).

Lynch, Kevin. What Time Is the Place? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972).

Mostafavi, Mohsen, and David Leatherbarrow. On Weathering (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).

 

My principal sources on trees and woods were Herbert L. Edlin’s What Wood Is That? A Manual of Wood Identification (New York: Viking Press, 1969) and Donald Culross Peattie’s A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).

 

Benoit Mandelbrot’s ideas about architectural ornament are discussed briefly in James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987).

 

On the history of the study and the rise of the modern individual the key work is A History of Private Life, edited by Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby. See Volume III, Passions of the Renaissance, especially Ariès’s introduction, as well as “The Refuges of Intimacy” by Orest Ranum, and “The Practical Impact of Writing” by Roger Chartier. See also John Lukacs’s essay “The Bourgeois Interior” in The American Scholar (Vol. 39, No. 4, Autumn 1970) and Mark Wigley’s essay “Untitled: The Housing of Gender” in Sexuality and Space, edited by Beatriz Colomina (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). Montaigne’s description of his study appears in “On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse” in Book III of Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays, translated by M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 1987).