Surveys the types of homes found in twenty American small towns, and discusses house plans, features, and structural forms

The fully expanded, updated, and freshly designed second edition of the most comprehensive and widely acclaimed guide to domestic architecture: in print since its original publication in 1984, and acknowledged everywhere as the unmatched, essential guide to American houses. This revised edition includes a section on neighborhoods; expanded and completely new categories of house styles with photos and descriptions of each; an appendix on "Approaches to Construction in the 20th and 21st Centuries"; an expanded bibliography; and 600 new photographs and line drawings.

"This work uses the history of American funeral homes to reimagine the beginnings of our decentralized consumer landscape"--

This first-ever encyclopedia of the Midwest seeks to embrace this large and diverse area, to give it voice, and help define its distinctive character. Organized by topic, it encourages readers to reflect upon the region as a whole. Each section moves from the general to the specific, covering broad themes in longer introductory essays, filling in the details in the shorter entries that follow. There are portraits of each of the region's twelve states, followed by entries on society and culture, community and social life, economy and technology, and public life. The book offers a wealth of information about the region's surprising ethnic diversity -- a vast array of foods, languages, styles, religions, and customs -- plus well-informed essays on the region's history, culture and values, and conflicts. A site of ideas and innovations, reforms and revivals, and social and physical extremes, the Midwest emerges as a place of great complexity, signal importance, and continual fascination.

The fascinating history of the twentieth century's most successful experiment in mass housing While the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, and their contemporaries frequently influences our ideas about house design at the midcentury, most Americans during this period lived in homes built by little-known builders who also served as developers of the communities. Often dismissed as "little boxes, made of ticky-tacky," the tract houses of America's postwar suburbs represent the twentieth century’s most successful experiment in mass housing. Houses for a New World is the first comprehensive history of this uniquely American form of domestic architecture and urbanism. Between 1945 and 1965, more than thirteen million houses—most of them in new ranch and split-level styles—were constructed on large expanses of land outside city centers, providing homes for the country’s rapidly expanding population. Focusing on twelve developments in the suburbs of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, Barbara Miller Lane tells the story of the collaborations between builders and buyers, showing how both wanted houses and communities that espoused a modern way of life—informal, democratic, multiethnic, and devoted to improving the lives of their children. The resulting houses differed dramatically from both the European International Style and older forms of American domestic architecture. Based on a decade of original research, and accompanied by hundreds of historical images, plans, and maps, this book presents an entirely new interpretation of the American suburb. The result is a fascinating history of houses and developments that continue to shape how tens of millions of Americans live. Featured housing developments in Houses for a New World: Boston area: Governor Francis Farms (Warwick, RI) Wethersfield (Natick, MA) Brookfield (Brockton, MA) Chicago area: Greenview Estates (Arlington Heights, IL) Elk Grove Village Rolling Meadows Weathersfield at Schaumburg Los Angeles and Orange County area: Cinderella Homes (Anaheim, CA) Panorama City (Los Angeles) Rossmoor (Los Alamitos, CA) Philadelphia area: Lawrence Park (Broomall, PA) Rose Tree Woods (Broomall, PA)

"Provides an excellent introduction as well as suggestions for using these plans to add architectural detail to your own home...an excellent bibliography."--Victorian Homes "The best home, barn and landscape designs...in a charming book....[It] contains numerous original illustrations showing a wealth of construction details, site plans and plantings."--Fine Homebuilding This classic bestseller contains the finest collection of architectural designs from a bygone era--and it's a boon for anyone hoping to construct that dream house or add charming touches to a modern one. Hundreds of illustrations from actual 19th century building plans feature architects' blueprints and drawings, full-color photos, and more. The buildings range from humble farmers' cabins to summer getaway cottages for the rich, and there's plenty of detail work, including built-in shelves, dormers, and turned balusters. With this information, an architect could easily create anything shown on the pages.

Stonemasons from the Alpine valleys of northwestern Italy shaped the architectural face of Paradise Valley in northern Nevada in the 1860s and 1870s. Drawing on their own distinctive skills, they constructed the constellation of granite and sandstone buildings that are the region's most visible landmarks. Marshall's analysis of this architectural legacy, illustrated with 229 photographs and 70 line drawings, is not only a valuable resource for scholars in vernacular architecture, folklore, and cultural geography, but also a verbal and visual treat for all who love the American West.

Spatial and cultural analysis have recently found much common ground, focusing in particular on the nature of the city. Place/Culture/Representation brings together new and established voices involved in the reshaping of cultural geography. The authors argue that as we write our geographies we are not just representing some reality, we are creating meaning. Writing becomes as much about the author as it is about purported geographical reality. The issue becomes not scientific truth as the end but the interpretation of cultural constructions as the means. Discussing authorial power, discourses of the other, texts and textuality, landscape metaphor, the sites of power-knowledge relations and notions of community and the sense of place, the authors explore the ways in which a more fluid and sensitive geographer's art can help us make sense of ourselves and the landscapes and places we inhabit and think about.

"The first architect-designed gas station - a Pittsburgh Gulf station in 1913 - was also the first to offer free road maps; the familiar Shell name and logo date from 1907, when a British mother-of-pearl importer expanded its line to include the newly discovered oil of the Dutch East Indies; the first enclosed gas stations were built only after the first enclosed cars made motoring a year-round activity - and operating a service station was no longer a "seasonal" job; the system of "octane" rating was introduced by Sun Oil as a marketing gimmick (74 for premium in 1931)." "As the number of "true" gas stations continues its steady decline - from 239,000 in 1969 to fewer than 100,000 today - the words and images of this book bear witness to an economic and cultural phenomenon that was perhaps more uniquely American than any other of this century."--Jacket.

As an archetype for an entire class of places, Main Street has become one of America's most popular and idealized images. In Main Street Revisited, the first book to place the design of small downtowns in spatial and chronological context, Richard Francaviglia finds the sources of romanticized images of this archetype, including Walt Disney's Main Street USA, in towns as diverse as Marceline, Missouri, and Fort Collins, Colorado. Francaviglia interprets Main Street both as a real place and as an expression of collective assumptions, designs, and myths; his Main Streets are treasure troves of historic patterns. Using many historical and contemporary photographs and maps for his extensive fieldwork and research, he reveals a rich regional pattern of small-town development that serves as the basis for American community design. He underscores the significance of time in the development of Main Street's distinctive personality, focuses on the importance of space in the creation of place, and concentrates on popular images that have enshrined Main Street in the collective American consciousness.