100 Houses (Midi Series) [Paperback]

Gennaro Postiglione (Author)

Book Description

Series: Midi Series | Publication Date: March 1, 2004

If these walls could speak... The greatest challenge in designing homes is negotiating the delicate balance between aesthetics and the personal desires of the occupants. While it's important for the structure to reflect the vision and style of the architect, the client must ultimately feel at home beneath the roof. It is particularly interesting, therefore, to examine the homes that architects create for themselves. If houses reflect their owners' personalities, then architects' own homes are like autobiographies. Location, layout, style, lighting, artwork, furnishings--every detail adds color to the story. Each of these 100 dwellings, presented A-Z by architect, speaks more about its designer than any other building possibly could.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When architects design their own homes, they become their own dream clients. For anyone intrigued by the possibilities of domestic architecture, One Hundred Houses for One Hundred European Architects of the Twentieth Century initially seems as if it will be a fascinating entré into the private worlds leading modern architects have built for themselves. Beginning with the great Finnish modernist Alvar Aalto and ending with John Young, an Englishman best known for his high-tech designs for airports, the book includes famous figures (Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray, Victor Horta, William Morris, Otto Wagner) as well as architects unknown outside specialist circles. Each house is illustrated with a floor plan and exterior and interior photographs--many in color--and each architect's major projects are listed, along with brief bibliographies. So far, so good. Unfortunately, many of the brief individual essays are written in stiff, bureaucratic prose with all the earmarks of a bad translation. The numerous authors offer up facts without relating the homes to the lives and design philosophies of the architects in vivid and insightful ways. Editor Gennaro Postiglione's terse and stilted introduction is equally disappointing. As if to acknowledge these problems, the book is printed in hard-to-read gray type. Still, some of the entries offer more personal glimpses. When Swedish architect Gert Wingårdh enlarged an 18th-century farmhouse by adding two subtly-angled wings, he managed to combine his seemingly contradictory love of traditional materials and Venturian complexity with "green" technology--still in its infancy in 1990. Working with wood, a peat and grass-covered roof, and floors of limestone or pine, he achieved a sensual harmony of forms and spaces. --Cathy Curtis

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Taschen (March 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3822863122
• ISBN-13: 978-3822863121
• Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 8 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,190,328 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great sourcebook..., April 5, 2008

By 

Elie G. Haddad (Beirut, Lebanon) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 100 Houses for 100 Architects (Special Edition) (Hardcover)

This book is not as bad as the previous reviewer makes it out to be. It presents a wide selection of architects houses, from William Morris in the Nineteenth Century to Francine Houben at the end of the Twentieth. The documentation of every house is quite decent and gives a good understanding of the spaces, with a good textual explanation, and the photographs are of great quality. Some houses have probably rarely appeared in print, as for instance those of Fernando Tavora, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Jose Antonio Coderch. Besides, the book gives a great idea about these architects' conception of the 'home', as for instance in Coderch's case, who conceived his house in a vernacular mode quite different from the architecture he is known for.

0 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Only Fair -- simple review, because simply many better architecture books than this one, May 14, 2007

By 

Mark A. Weiss (Germantown, MD United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: 100 Houses (Midi Series) (Paperback)

There's nothing terrible about the book. But it is so easily beat out by other architecture books (including others by Taschen publishing) that there's no reason to get this book or waste your time reading much about it.