Customer Reviews

Key Houses of the Twentieth Century: Plans, Sections and Elevations (Key Architecture Series)

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

 

 

Few books offer you a chance to see how the building is laid out and organized. Great book, especially for architects and designers.

This is a tremendous compendium of guess what--key houses. What's initially impressive are the author's editorial choices. The important, canonical, expected houses are here, (Farnsworth, Villa Savoye, Fallingwater, Aalto, Kahn, Gropius, Eames are represented), but there are many pleasant and welcome surprises, like the Wittgenstein house and the rotating Villa Girasole. Important choices you'd expect to be left out, like the Melnikov house or the Shodhan house, are included, so, along with the CD, which may have some flaws or limitations, nonetheless gives architecture students an amazing archive of case study material at their fingertips. Highly recommended.

I really enjoyed this book, especially because it has a Cd in the back cover with all the pdf files of pictures and dwg files of CAD drawings for the floor plans of each project.

The only downside is that there is only 2 pictures per project, but on the other hand it does have all the main architects of the Twentieth Century.

I bought this book to research a specific house, and while it did not have a lot of information on any single house, it is a good compilation of houses. There were plenty from all parts of the century from varying architects, so I got a good taste of many different architectural style.
I loved that cd- i had to print out many scaled copies of plans, and i could do it without fumbling around with around on a copy machine. I could just print it out.
overall, pretty happy i picked this book

The so called CD of drawings is a joke. True, the drawings are in a real CAD format but they are really nothing more that worthless sketches. Buy the book for the information provide (however brief) on each structure but not for the CD.