Customer Reviews

American Shelter: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the American Home

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If your bookshelf only has room for one book on American architecture, this should be that book. Most of the books on architecture seem like a lot of style, but not much substance: many pages of pictures, often quite enticing, but leaving the reader with little knowledge of just what constitutes the various architecture styles so illustrated, or how styles relate to one another.

Lester Walker spent hundreds of hours researching various American architectural styles, going to such sources as the 1900's editions of Ladies Home Journal, which published plans for "A Small House With Lots of Room in it" by a young upstart named Frank Lloyd Wright. Walker gives us the first-floor house plans, along with a birds-eye view of Wright's "Small House." In this illustration Walker uses captions and arrows to innumerate the salient features of "Wrightian" architecture.

So it goes throughout American Shelter. Walker starts with the dwellings of American Indians and takes us through over 100 different styles that were popular at one time or another in our diverse history. A read through this book is a stroll through our history. The author not only points out the defining features of each style, but also tells why and how it came into vogue.

Color photos are not the only "must have" features conspicuously absent. Missing is also judgmental, cavalier, snobbery. No architectural style is treated as inferior, common, or "tiresome." Quonset Hut, Converted Train Car, and Prefabricated are given just as much respect as Victorian, International, and Prairie.

Examples of houses of various architects that typify or characterize each style are shown in line drawings with accompanying floor plans and often with illustrations on house building styles or techniques. For example, on page 71 a "method for making cedar clapboards" is illustrated. Balloon, Platform, and Post and Beam framing methods are explained with accompanying illustrations.

The book is about individual dwelling units, not apartment houses, and not commercial or industrial buildings. For what it is, and does, it is the definitive work. I have had many hours of enjoyable reading and learning from this book. My only complaint is with the bookbinder, not the author. Some of the pages of my copy are upside down! Perhaps, like the famous upside-down airplane stamp, my copy is rare and valuable? Then again: perhaps not, but right side up, or upside down, it has been well worth the purchase price.

One final piece of advise: buy the hardback copy, not the paperback. This book is a "keeper", one you will frequenly get down from the bookself to review, loan to friends (holding the friend's firstborn ransome for the book's return), and pass on in your will.

In the world of architectural field guides, there is a division between the guides that rely heavily on photographs and those that use line drawings to represent buildings. Photographic field guides are good in that you can see actual historic homes. This is a valuable thing for people who like me live very far away from historic areas and rarely see a building over a hundred years old.

However, the great problem with photographic field guides is that it is often times difficult to understand a building style by looking at one or two representative photographs. What's worse is that often times the eye is drawn to details like electric lines or automobiles. One can spend more time trying to identify the decade the photo was taken than on concentrating on the image. For this reason, I prefer field guides that use line drawings to represent buildings. In my opinion, line drawings are a better tool for teaching the different architectural elements that come together to form a style.

Of the field guides that use line drawings, Lester Walker's "American Shelter" is the very best. It is the best for two reasons. First because of the sheer number of styles he identifies. In this book he details 103 styles whereas a typical field guide will usually identifies 20-30 unique styles. Second and foremost, Lester Walker is a very talented artist. His drawings are not hyper technical like the Historical American Building Survey (HABS) drawings which one finds in some field guides. They have a lot of personality which seperates them from what I call the illustrator school of architectural drawings.

I have been collecting field guides for a number of years and this is my favorite guide. That is not to say that there are not other very high quality guides. However, if you need to purchase just one field guide, this is the one. Hopefully, this book will inspire you to start collecting architectural field guides which in my opinion is a most worthy hobby.

For reasons beyond my comprehension this book has a very strong gravitational pull. Even before I realized that this priceless compilation of architectural styles had a use I was attracted to it like a moth is attracted to a flickering light. Scientific studies show that moths fly into the light because of an intense parallax effect: moths find direction by the angle of the light, and the angle changes as the moth flies by, forcing it to veer off into the lamp in order to keep going "forward". Fortunately enough, contact with this book is not quite as damaging for you as it is for the above-mentioned moth, however alluring the prospect might be.

Every beautiful page of American Shelter is devoted entirely to a specific architectural style, which is usually described in terms of a large, detailed line drawing from a 3/4 above view, followed by several sketches detailing the dimensions, followed with a simplified sketch explaining the style's basic shapes, all finally elucidated by a written passage. American Shelter is as useful to the architect as it is to the writer as it is to the researcher. Enjoy.

Lester Walker's "American Shelter" is one of those great reference works which is not only informative, but also fascinating and beautiful. A true illustrated encyclopedia of the American home (as the subtitle says), this book covers a vast range of styles, historical periods, and geographic regions.

Each short chapter--beginning with Native American earth lodges and ending with speculative space station housing--covers a specific type of home architecture in the United States. Walker's straightforward prose is accompanied by cutaway drawings, detailed floor plans, and superbly rendered drawings of home exteriors.

It would be impossible in a short review to name all of the various styles covered by Walker. He covers everything from such well-known styles as the A-frame and Greek Revival to styles that may be less familiar to some: the baled hay and sod homes of 1890s Nebraska, the silo and yurt homes which gained popularity in the 1970s, and more. Another fascinating part of the book is the presence of many famous homes: Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water, and more.

Along the way, the reader will encounter many wonderful surprises--check out, for example, the "Elephant House" designed by James Lafferty! "American Shelter" is a book that you can pick up and start reading anywhere. But if you read this from cover to cover, you will have taken a truly epic journey with a master artist-historian.

I purchased this book while I was an undergraduate studying city planning. This book has been on my shelf since it was published and I still use it quite frequently today. This is a fantastic reference for anyone interested in housing, architecture and urban design. In fact, I highly recommend this book to any planning students with a housing or preservation focus. You will not regret having made the investment!

If you ever have reason to write (fictionally or otherwise) about American architecture (chiefly domestic), you shouldn't miss a chance to add this volume to your shelves. (It's included in the file I always send to Old-West mavens wanting to know what they should read.) Chapters range from two to eight pages in length and cover everything from the earth lodge of the Southeastern Plains Indians to the projected space station now three years past due. Typically, each includes the time and region in which the original style was most abundant, a few paragraphs explaining its history and salient features, and a number of finely detailed pen-and-ink sketches portraying exterior details and often cutaways and floor plans. The book can also be used as a field guide to help you decide what kind of house you happen to be looking at. From log cabins to Frank Lloyd Wright, Mount Vernon to the humble Quonset hut, every major kind of American house is here. This is an item that cries to be brought back into print. Until it is, don't miss a chance to pick up a used copy if you're afforded one.

This book prsents with unusual clarity an explanation of the many architectural styles people often refer to without actually knowing what they mean. A huge amount of information has been absorbed, condensed and presented in a very accessible manner. The actual depth of this book belies its apparent simplicity. This book succeeds at presenting a body of work which would be interesting to laymen as well as professionals and organizes it in a very fascinating timeline of development of styles and subsequent reactions. This book can really set your imagination going or help you focus your otherwise random thoughts about home design, styles and their real roots.

Bet you can't read just one. You cannot read just one page about one house and pore over the drawing of just that one house. I am not an architect, a builder, designer, or (anymore) even a houseowner, and I was grabbed by this book. And you will want to look at it again and again. This book is more than an work of love in which 103 kinds of American houses are described, it is-- unintentionally I suspect-- an anthropological study! And it is a study worthy of a doctoral dissertation in history. Our author moves easily from wigwams to Victorian houses to Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Houses and on. Surely he has missed something-- perhaps my deceased old Granddad's "Molly Brown" house, which uses piles of rocks for its foundation (you can see an excellent example of the style at the entrance to the Smokey Mts Park from the Eastern side). You will be looking at houses with a keen eye as you drive down the street after reading this book. You will not be able to help it, nor will you want to, for it is enriching. In this sense the book will forever change you, and you will be enlightened in a minor way.

Over 1,000 Blk & wht line drawings depict housing on land designated as the mainland U.S.A.

Beginning with Native American lodging of 300 AD and progressing chronologically to early settlers and eventually even to mobile homes & campers, and lastly to a futuristic space station(!), this book shows variety.

The 1970's section is especially fun for me where the author reviewed the Geodesic Dome, house boats, passive and active solar, modular, inflatable, and earth sheltered homes, plus more (including the more conventional).

I appreciate the vertically exploded illustrations that start with a sample floor plan on the bottom, show framed construction in the middle, and finish with a view of the exterior on top. These views were always at an angle, so that the resulting 3-D view shows the roof, a side, and the front.

A concise glossary is in the back.

My complaint: Even though titled "American Shelters" please note that the author did not include those homes native to Hawaii or Alaska.

I have a casual interest in architecture -- I am no professional, nor have taken any classes on the subject -- but I do own almost 200 books on architecture and consider this a GREAT Addition to my shelf!

Another great book I like that concentrates on blk & wht photographs: A Field Guide to American Houses by Virgina & Lee McAlester. These two make good companions.

I write this message quite bleary eyed--I made the mistake of opening American Shelter around 11:30pm last night, just as I was drowsily stretching out beneath the covers in the full anticipation of quickly dozing off. It was well past two in the morning when my wife made me finally turn the light off. A delightful and captivating work, indeed.