Customer Reviews

Barns (Norton/Library of Congress Visual Sourcebooks)

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I highly recommend this book for general readers and researchers interested in relationships between architecture and history. John Vlach has a comprehensive knowledge of architecture, and he insightfully writes about the importance of barns and rural cultural landscapes as resources for studying history. This new volume is an important resource for studies of rural folk culture as it provides studies of a great variety of barns and an array of approaches for learning about vernacular architecture.

I am an architect and I bought this book to research barn types for a barn I am renovating. The CD with it was a pleasant bonus, however, I wish the pictures were higher resolution. It is very difficult to ferret out the actual built details on some of these barns--the pictures in the book are small, and the CD wasn't as helpful as I hoped.. The history of barn types was very helpful, and nice to see the HABS/HAER program drawings included. It is a fairly comprehensive survey. I wish more barn types had been included in the Northeast section, and of course more structural detailing drawings or photos would have been nice throughout--not just elevations and floor plans. Structural systems for heavy timber framing and distributing lateral loads vary a lot throughout the country, and by barn type, and often inform how the barn is used--there are better books for that.

I especially liked the built farm equipment section (hay cranes), even though that wasn't why I bought it, because I'd never seen pictures of it before. And old hay stack methods before the balers were invented were also interesting. The history of the transverse crib barn was very useful.