From the Princeton Architectural Press: Alternately lauded as the future of architecture or dismissed as pure folly, revolving buildings are a fascinating missing chapter in architectural history with surprising relevance to issues in contemporary architectural design. Rotating structures have been employed to solve problems and create effects that stationary buildings can't achieve. Rotating buildings offered ever-changing vistas and made interior spaces more flexible and adaptable. They were used to impress visitors, treat patients, and improve the green qualities of a structure by keeping particular rooms in or out of the sun. The follow-up to his critically acclaimed book A-frame, Chad Randl's Revolving Architecture: A History of Buildings that Rotate, Swivel, and Pivot explores the history of this unique building type, investigating the cultural forces that have driven people to design and inhabit them. Revolving Architecture is packed with a variety of fantastic revolving structures such as a jail that kept inmates under a warden's constant surveillance, glamorous revolving restaurants, tuberculosis treatment wards, houses, theaters, and even a contemporary residential building whose full-floor apartments circle independently of each other. International examples from the late 1800s though the present demonstrate the variety and innovation of these dynamic structures.
From the Princeton Architectural Press: "A" was the architectural letterform of leisure building in postwar America. Eager to stake out mountain and lakeside retreats, an entire generation of high-end homebuilders and weekend handymen found the A-frame an easy and affordable home to construct; its steeply sloping triangular roof distinctive and easy to maintain (almost no exterior walls to paint!). Fueled by A-frame plans and kits, the style became something of a national craze, with tens of thousands of houses built. Indeed, the A-frame was an icon for recreation, an acceptable form of modernism (although its origins go back thousands of years), and a convenient tool for marketing a wide range of products, including gas-powered toilets, motorcycles, and canned vegetables; Fisher-Price even made one for children. So popular on the domestic front, the A-Frame was eventually adapted to other building types, from roadside restaurants to churches.In a fascinating look at this architectural phenomenon, Chad Randl tells the story of the "triangle" house from prehistoric Japan to its lifestyle-changing heyday in the 1960s. Part architectural history and part cultural exploration, A-Frame documents every aspect of A-frame living using cartoons, ads, high-style and do-it-yourself examples, family snapshots, and even an appendix with a complete set of blueprints in case you want to build your own!
From the University of Georgia Press: Today hop growing remains a viable commercial enterprise only in parts of the far western United States-notably in Washington. But, as James Fenimore Cooper remembered, the mid-nineteenth century in Cooperstown, New York, was a time when "the 'hop was king, ' and the whole countryside was one great hop yard, and beautiful".
In Tinged with Gold, Michael A. TomIan explores all aspects of hop culture in the United States and provides a background for understanding the buildings devoted to drying, baling, and storing hops. The work considers the history of these structures as it illustrates their development over almost two centuries, the result of agrarian commercialism and nearly continuous technological improvement. In examining the context in which the buildings were constructed, Tomlan considers the growth, cultivation, and harvesting of the plant; the economic, social, and recreational activities of the people involved in hop culture; and the record of mechanical inventions and technical developments that shaped hop kilns, hop houses, and hop driers and coolers in the various areas where the crop flourished. The work challenges assumptions about the noncommercial nature of American agriculture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and raises important questions about the "folk" tradition of hop houses, arguing that the designs of these buildings were rational responses to commercial imperatives rather than the continuance of arcane English or European customs.Tinged with Gold brings hop culture to life as it explores the history of this neglected aspect of rural agriculture. Because the work demonstrates that the significance of a relatively obscure building type can befully appreciated if placed in its historical context, it provides a model for studying other rural structures. Drawing upon an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, this work is a definitive history of hop culture in the United States.
In Tinged with Gold, Michael A. TomIan explores all aspects of hop culture in the United States and provides a background for understanding the buildings devoted to drying, baling, and storing hops. The work considers the history of these structures as it illustrates their development over almost two centuries, the result of agrarian commercialism and nearly continuous technological improvement. In examining the context in which the buildings were constructed, Tomlan considers the growth, cultivation, and harvesting of the plant; the economic, social, and recreational activities of the people involved in hop culture; and the record of mechanical inventions and technical developments that shaped hop kilns, hop houses, and hop driers and coolers in the various areas where the crop flourished. The work challenges assumptions about the noncommercial nature of American agriculture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and raises important questions about the "folk" tradition of hop houses, arguing that the designs of these buildings were rational responses to commercial imperatives rather than the continuance of arcane English or European customs.
Tinged with Gold brings hop culture to life as it explores the history of this neglected aspect of rural agriculture. Because the work demonstrates that the significance of a relatively obscure building type can befully appreciated if placed in its historical context, it provides a model for studying other rural structures. Drawing upon an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, this work is a definitive history of hop culture in the United States.
From Amazon.com: A city’s history is made visible in its buildings, structures, sites and landscaping. A history of the architecture of Richmond, Indiana, is explored in this new book through more than 130 illustrations, including maps, subdivision plats, aerial views, and streetscapes that put individual buildings in their urban settings. The book gives readers access to Richmond’s history by examining its physical nature along with a broad range of factors involved in decades of growth and change. For readers who are familiar with Richmond, the book brings a fresh understanding of a well known place; for those just being introduced to Richmond, the book presents ideas applicable to the study of other communities, and an understanding of how developments in one community contribute to a broader state or national picture.
© 2009, Historic Preservation Planning Alumni, Inc., Ithaca, NY