Simple Rules: Building Elements (Simple Design Rules for Architects & Builders, #2)
Description
Simple Rules Volume II Building Elements is inspired by long forgotten 18th, 19th, and early 20th-century builder pocket reference and architectural guides.
Simple Rules features timeless composition principles, elegant proportional systems, and inspiring formulas to advance modern-day building design. This collection will help simplify the complicated building design process, by presenting time-honored traditions that blend naturally with modern logic, and sanction architectural innovation. While the content of this small handbook is mostly based on American vernacular building traditions, the ideas resurrected and abridged here are universal and timeless. Architects and home builders can apply these key concepts and techniques for practical use anywhere and in any style. Simple Rules is a collection of clearly illustrated principles and detailed design techniques that will prove useful not only to the builder who values aesthetics as much as, or perhaps more, than their bottom line, but to the residential designer, homebuyer, and real estate professional as well. It will inspire the artist and craftsman but also appeal to the student and armchair architect. In fact, it will resonate with anyone who enjoys thoughtfully designed homes. Preview of new rules: WINDOW PROPORTIONS "Rules of aesthetics state: proper proportions of an opening height may be twice its width, 2:1 or height may be equal to the diagonal of the square of the smaller side, √2: 1 or height may be equal to its width, in a ratio of Φ: 1." LIGHT EQUALLY DISTRIBUTED "A room is always more cheerful when light is admitted at both ends" CHIMNEYS "And in point of external effect, it is much more pleasing to see the chimney tops rising from the apex, or highest part of the roof, than from its lowest edge." STAIRS "the staircase must occupy exactly that position in which it can be made an ornament and a pleasing feature in the room, all of which it is quite capable of being, and a position in which it does not detract from the cosiness, or give any unpleasant feeling of draughtiness, or too great openness"
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Person
Shannon Scarlett is a registered architect, with an established Boston area architectural practice.
For over twenty-five years she has worked directly with residential clients to create elegant personalized homes. She works to resolve issues of aesthetics, flexibility and functionality of existing and new built space, to improve environmental sustainability while also enhancing community participation. But she's also been frustrated that she can't help a broader group of homeowners.
She began writing ten years ago, as a way of working through her own confusion about why residential architecture has lost the vitality it used to have. She has begun to share in her books some of what her research revealed.
As an architectural history buff, Shannon's knowledge of art history serves as a primary source of inspiration for her work-guiding the architectural experience through material expression, psychological effects of spatial composition and even subtle building symbolism.
