Customer Reviews

Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is undoubtedly a niche book and not typical bedtime reading material. However, if you are someone who appreciates design from a critical perspective and are looking for resources to practice and compare your evaluation of a space with an expert, this is amazing. I also found immense value in the paintings, looking at the relationships, and then agreeing or disagreeing with the appropriateness of the framework that the author uses to evaluate each composition.

This is not a how-to book and the value of the book doesn't pretend to be its writing style. This is a resource that you pick up, skim to something interesting, and suddenly uncover something that you hadn't thought of before.

I love and recommend this book but only for a small subset of people. If you don't already have a bookshelf filled with design resources and evaluate design on a regular basis, then this probably isn't the book for you.

This idea for this book sold it, and I was intrigued. Alas, it was impossible to enjoy reading, and I did finally give up less than halfway through. Large type and flimsy wording is compounded by the need to refer to the back of the book's footnotes in almost every paragraph. This is so annoying and completely disrupts the flow of reading. The pictures are somewhat interesting, but the author states in the beginning that the paintings were done separately from the writing, therefore they have little relation to each other. The author apparently couldn't figure out his theme till after the illustrations were made! This too makes the book choppy. A waste of time and money.

I found this book boring and unhelpful. I was looking for advice about how to arrange obects in a pleasing manner. I could not follow the prose.
I really did like "The Wabi Sabi House". It is a better investment.