Customer Reviews

Domus, Volume 5, 1960-1964

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First of all, before you even think about buying any of the 12 volumes of the Taschen Domus series of that Italian architecture and interior design magazine, make sure that you have already spent money on buying a GOOD magnifying glass and a GOOD Italian-English dictionary. If the dictionary does not have Italian verb charts and a grammar section then you will need to buy a separate Italian grammar book. (I ended up buying the Collins Italian Concise Dictionary, 5th Edition, which has 884 pages of easy to read & extensive definitions PLUS another 229 pages of Italian verb charts and explanations of Italian grammar. It is paperback and retails new for US $17.99 .) Why spend the time, effort, and money on a dictionary & magnifying glass for Taschen Domus volumes that are touted as "bilingual"? The simple answer is that many things in them are not translated into English and/or impossible to read as they were shrunk considerably from the originals. EXAMPLES: Starting on Page 297 of Volume V (1960-1964) and for a total of 5 pages with 11 photographs and 2 line drawings (with only 2 of the photos in color) of the then new U.S. embassy in Karachi Pakistan designed by the architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander and where you will see two of the black and white photos were shrank to a ridiculous 2 inches by 1 inch! The so called "translation" is on Page 558 (You will be doing a lot of inconvenient flipping back and forth!) and consists of 6 sentences in English whereas the original Italian is more than 3 times as long. That the editors of these newer volumes made the choice to leave out translations is particularaly troublesome because they chose to include in each Taschen volume several full page advertisements for such things as typewriters (Pages 45, 181 in Vol V), cars, lights, etc. They also made the choice to leave out many, many, entire articles and sometimes entire months out of the 12 original monthly issues each year of Domus; the Taschen editors only included approximately 100 pages for EACH entire year! In Volume VI (1965-1969) on Page 46 there is a 6 page article with the title "Neutra Quasi In Italia" and is translated at the bottom of the page as "Neutra Nearly in Italy" and the Taschen editors chose to include a full page (!) black and white face photo of Neutra with the enlightening caption of "Portrait of Richard Neutra" but at the same time shrank SIX pages of the original 1965 article into TWO pages with some of the photos only one and a half inches square (!) and even worse; NONE of the many paragraphs written in Italian about this wonderful house were translated! More than half the photos in both of the 1960s volumes are in black and white and many of those as well as the color ones are of poor quality; fuzzy and out of focus. Even the the US magazine "Better Homes and Gardens" had better photos in the 1960s. The same problems exist in the earlier years/volumes starting with 1928; although of course it is understandable why there were so few color photos then, but there is NO excuse for the exclusion of entire translations and the shrinking of photos and texts about renowned architects/buildings and the inclusion of full page absurd advertisements in their place. The fact that this 12 Volume series was published 5 years ago in 2006 for U.S.$600+ and that there are currently so many volumes for sale but yet so few Amazon reviews speaks "volumes"; apparently some of the original buyers are trying to recoup their losses by asking excessive prices for those used and in many cases "unread - like new" volumes. Thank you for taking the time to read my review in its entirety.