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Perspective Resources
By Matt Alderton
 The Ranch House
Alan Hess
240 pages
Harry N. Abrams
$45
In the wake of the Great Depression and the second World War, Americans in the 1940s, 50s and 60s were eager to rebuild not only their lives, but also their homes. In the midst of a Baby Boom, the country moved to suburbia, where it built a new kind of family and constructed a new kind of house: the ranch.
Today, the ranch-style home is making a comeback. Younger generations are discovering — and Baby Boomers are rediscovering — the qualities that made the ranch-style house so popular in the first place. Sliding glass doors provide direct access to a private patio and backyard from inside the home, perfect for indoor-outdoor living. The easy-access kitchen is convenient and the close-knit living space keeps children always close at hand. The single-story floor plan is utilitarian, while the L- and U-shaped layouts are symbols of relaxed living.
In The Ranch House, Alan Hess, Architecture Critic for the San Jose Mercury News, offers an insider’s look at this populist design. His 240-page tour of more than 35 ranch-style houses, photographed especially for the book by architectural photographer Noah Sheldon, is both historical and architectural; interesting to the ranch homeowner and designer alike.
The Ranch House really is two books in one. The first three chapters detail the 75-year evolution of the ranch-style house and of planned suburban communities in the U.S., such as Levittown, which sprouted in the late 1940s in Hempstead, N.Y., with 6,000 Cape Cod homes. They describe the work of designers such as Cliff May, William Wurster, Lutah Maria Riggs, O’Neil Ford and David R. Williams, as well as builder-developers John F. Long, David Bohannon, Kaiser Community Homes and American Community Builders. The final chapter — the second half of the book — is dedicated to a pictorial tour of contemporary American ranch houses. The strength of this book is that it offers something for every audience: historical photography for the die-hard ranch homeowner, a cultural history for residential designers and a worthy library addition for anyone with an interest in Americana.
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REVIEWS
 The Magic of Tents: Transforming Space
Alejandro Bahamón
Colombian Architect Alejandro Bahamón illustrates how designers can incorporate lightweight fabrics, canopies, tents and membranes into their designs for an effect that is both creative and functional. These unconventional materials create spaces that are inventive in shape and which interact with their environment in ways that traditional building materials cannot. The result is creative, cost-effective and environmentally-friendly design.
Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media
Mitchell Schwarzer
In Zoomscape, architectural historian Mitchell Schwarzer proposes that buildings reflect the perceptual characteristics of their time. As architectural “tourists,” he argues that we experience buildings, cities and landscapes at high speeds and from great distances, primarily via transportation (through the windows of our cars, trains and airplanes) and mass media (photographs, movies and television). Mitchell calls this new, mediated architectural experience the zoomscape.
Portable Houses
Irene Rawlings and Mary Abel
Portable Houses is a picturesque tribute to roving homes of every sort, from the most basic RV to a 3,000-square-foot home built with packing crates, shipping containers, recycled newspapers and bamboo. Sectioned according to structures such as Trailers; Buses & RVs; Trains, Planes and Boats; Tents & Yurts and Sheep Wagons, the book features advice on purchasing, remodeling and building your own movable dream home.
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WEB SITES
 Housing Prototypes
www.housingprototypes.org
A virtual guide to multifamily housing across the globe, Housing Prototypes is dedicated to the international study of contemporary trends in residential design. A dynamic, interactive database, it contains a wealth of projects searchable by name, architect, building type, city and country. It is continually updated with bibliographic resources, building descriptions, drawings and photos, and features projects that range in size from single buildings to massive housing developments with thousands of dwellings.
Transstudio
www.transstudio.com
Transstudio is home to Transmaterial, a downloadable guide to material innovation in design. A catalog of products and processes that are “redefining our physical environment,” it is based on a compilation of product reviews by Blaine Brownell of architectural problem-solving company nbbj.
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