Customer Reviews

Get Your House Right: Architectural Elements to Use & Avoid

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In the late 1930's, many of Germany's finest architects arrived in the United States fleeing from Hitler's persecution. Soon Architecture Programs throughout the country adopted their modernist agenda. For the last seventy years, modernism has been the dominant language of architecture school. With a few notable exceptions, the visual language of traditional and classical architecture has all but dissapeared from the halls of academia.

Modernism was embraced by America's cultural and business elites. However, most Americans have never bought into the modernist agenda. When it comes to homes, most new home buyers want houses built in traditional styles. Unfortunately, there has been a disconnect between what architects have been taught to design and what consumers wish to purchase. One need only drive through the streets of most American suburbs to see the numerous failed and often times grotesque attempts at traditional architecture.

Into this skills void steps Marianne Cusato. She is a product of Notre Dame's School Architecture, a program known for embracing traditional and classical architecture. "Get Your House Right" is a comprehensive guide to the architectural language of classicism. Through the use of nearly a thousand beautifully rendered pencil sketches, she shows both poorly and properly executed architectural details. In this relatively short book, Cusato tries to show other architects what they missed in their architectural studies.

I am not an architect. My hobby is looking at old houses. The value of this book is that it helps me understand why some houses work while others houses fail. For those interested in this subject, I would recommend Sandra Edelman and Judy Gaman's "What Not to Build" and "Traditional Construction Patterns" by Stephen Mouzon. One might also want to check out the web site(www.classicist.org)for more information about traditional architecture. These are some of the best resources to help one make sense of what has been going on architecturally in this country for the last seventy years. Highly recommended.

I live in Naperville, IL, the McMansion capital of the Midwest. I have watched new multi-million dollar houses go up, and I thought most of them were just plain ugly. Over-done, or pompous, or something. Yet they sell, even now, and they keep going up.

I started to think maybe it was just me.

Then I picked up this book, and there, just above the AVOID label that adorns many of the design examples in the book, was a pencil sketch of what could be a typical new-construction Naperville street.

Having read the book through -- and several parts twice -- I now understand what it was that was causing the rejection of this architecture by my inner voice: bad design. I have nailed down the specific elements in many actual houses that hurt the appearance of the house, that make it less -- much less -- than it could be.

And -- surprise! -- I found that the few houses I did like of the newer construction were properly designed to classical principles.

The book is an incredible achievement. Well-written, accessible, and with hundreds and hundreds of beautiful pencil sketches that clearly demonstrate the principles. Marianne Cusato is a young, brilliant and well-educated designer whose vision has been shaking the architecture world for several years. And she's all of 33 years old!

So get this book, read it through, and then have some fun. Start scanning front elevation drawings on house plan sites and see if you can spot the issues that keep each from being as welcoming, as home-y, as they could be.

We are embarking now on designing our own new home, and this book is by far the most important acquisition in our burgeoning design library.

Thanks, Marianne. We all owe you.

I have been absorbed by this book since my copy arrived. The organization is simple and easily accessible. Start in the beginning, middle or end, wherever you like. No problem reading two pages and putting it down until later.

The thing that makes this book exceptional are the illustrations. Thousands of the clearest sketches ever contained in a book, all expertly dovetailed with the text.

While this would have been my most cherished text in architecture school, it really excels for the practicing professional. Extremely practical. It shows how to design and build essential traditional house details like dormers, window and door trims, roofs, home entries, porches, chimneys, garage doors, bay windows, arches and more.

I have struggled for years with design issues in the buildings I renovate and (sometimes) modify. It is the "just doesn't look right" syndrome where you spend money and time on what you think is a good idea, but when it's done you can tell it looks goofy, or backwards, or convoluted or something.

Well this book is exactly addressed to people like me - indoctrinating the reader to the (seemingly) rigid rules of traditional architecture that have evolved over the centuries since we emerged from caves. It's like getting an abbreviated overview of the lessons learned by earlier generations of builders, condensed into a readable book. Probably the most notable lesson I gleaned from it is the importance of details on the overall look and feel of a building.

I know I'm not going to necessarily follow every rule on every decision I make - economics play an important role too - but at least now I have a little better understanding of where I can cut corners, and where spending a little more on the right details will be crucial. It's like having the wisdom of the ages at your back when making design decisions.

One thing that attracts me to traditional architecture is that it comes from times where buildings were much more monumental accomplishments than they are today. With our concrete and steel, equipment and technological advances, buildings go up in a matter of days rather than years, and will be replaced just as quickly if we decide we don't like them. Sometimes the way they look reflects this lack of thought necessary for their contstruction.

If you follow the guidance provided by this book, you building will at least look like an accomplishment worth celebrating.

Learn the forgotten language of architectural details.
This is one of the most important books on architecture written in decades. Marianne clearly teaches the lost art of designing homes with REAL traditional detailing that looks good and feels right. This is a must-read for architects, developers, and homebuilders.

With hundreds of excellent illustrations, the "do's" and "don'ts" are clearly explained. Marianne suggests that you must learn the rules before you can break them, and this book will be an excellent teacher.

I bought this book about a month or so ago. I have read through it once. While I will skim it again, from time to time, I'll be keeping it as an irreplaceable reference manual for home design or purchase.

The illustrations are gorgeous and pure genius. Most of them are NOT CAD drawings, but honest-to-goodness pencil illustrations, which all have a definite artistic flair to them.

The premise is simple: the Greeks and Romans got it right, and modern home designers try to ape their aesthetic without doing the requisite homework make awful looking houses. Once you read this book, you'll never be able to go into a rich new suburban development without easily being able to point out the painfully obvious design gaffes that abound. That's the downside--you're an instant architectural snob after one read. But the upside is that when it is time to YOU to buy or build, you'll know precisely what to look for and what to avoid.

Marianne Cusato has proven her genius with the "Katrina Cottage" design, which will probably set her for life financially. I hope it does, so she can focus all of her energies toward the classicist movement. I'd sure love to hire her to design my next home (if I could ever afford her now).

The modern architectural ethic of the last century, emphasizing a lack of details, machinelike designs, and a material driven ethos (steel, glass, and concrete) is absolutely put to shame by the Greek and Roman orders of proportion, balance, and detail. Hopefully, Ms. Cusato and her classicist colleagues can put the last few nails in that coffin. I could live the rest of my life quite well without having to view another gawd-awful building that looks like it was designed by Fisher Price.

This book is a masterpiece.

A most excellent book for detail-oriented people. There are architectural features inside and outside my house that just don't look "right" to me, but I could never figure exactly what was wrong and what needed to be done to correct them. With this book, Now I do! Wonderfully detailed drawings, with historical descriptions and reasoning -- this book should be required reading for any licensed developer or homebuilder. Where's my saw!

I found the details extrememly helpful. She does a very good job of discussing the details of architectural elements. This is the first book I have found that walked me through the application of classical design in the design of a building. Although this focuses on classical design and how it relates to residential design, I can see how these techniques could be applied to any building. There are two areas that I wish the author had covered. First was the idea of regulating lines. She mentions them but does not go into any depth about how they can be used to keep a design in scale. Second, I wish the author had gone into more detail on scaling the mass of a house. For example, how should the height of the roof relate to the mass of the house. Another variation on this would be how the height of the walls should relate to the length of the walls. I understand that the golden section can be used, but I sense that there is a lot more material that could explain this in better detail.

I enjoyed reading this book and it certainly increased my understanding of classical architecture. I didn't agree with everything 100% - some of the "don't do this" examples didn't look so bad to me but after finishing it I walked round the local streets I was certainly able to now understand why some of the McMansions in the area look totally wrong. I live in a city that has quite a few grand public buildings dating from the late 1800s so I think I'll appreciate them a bit more with my new knowledge. I'm unlikely to be building a "grand" house but there were some good tips about window positioning and sizing which I'll certainly be using for my more humble dwelling so I don't feel that I totally wasted my money ( which I suspected I had done when I first flicked through the pages ).

If you are an architect, builder, student or just interested in traditional residential architecture, this one of the first books you should own. Period!

This book should, and probably will, become the text book for those embarking on a career in residential design.

If I haven't made myself clear yet...if this is your field you need this book!

In addition, how many authors get to have HRH Prince Charles write the Forward?