The Iconic American House: Architectural Masterworks Since 1900

I'm really enjoying this beautiful book! The pictures are amazing and each home has a few so you get a good feel of the house. The description of each home gives some good details. We just bought a new home and bought this book for inspiration and it's working.

Beautiful pictures

Spectacular and stunning photography on every page. Very inspirational stimulating and insightful. A must own book for your library

The author continues his Iconic Architectural series with this book of fifty houses from 1902 to 2010. The six page illustrated introduction says that America benefited from an influx of European architects in the last century with fresh concepts to mix with traditional design ideas which had developed over a couple of centuries from earlier European settlers.Obviously many of the truly iconic and world famous are here: Falling Water; Neutra's Desert House; Eames House; Johnson's Glass House; Farnsworth House; Gwathmey House but I was surprised to find a selection of homes that have been thoughtfully designed outside the architectural box. For example there are three circular houses, Ford House by Bruce Goff, Deaton's Sculptured House and the intriguing Round House by Richard Foster which can completely rotate (if required) in forty-eight minutes and in either direction. The geography of America allows for plenty of land to build on and this is reflected in a common theme of space in so many houses in the book. Sunnylands in Rancho Mirage, California by Quincy Jones and Saarinen's Miller House in Columbus, Indiana both have huge living rooms with a selection of seating areas. Another theme is designing houses that merge into the landscape, to the extent that the outside becomes part of the structure. Wright and Leavitt's Dragon Rock, Lautner's Elrod House and Albert Frey's home all use large and small boulders as irregular shaped walls. Frey's living room and bedroom is build round a massive boulder several feet high.The last few houses in the book contradict the traditional house idea. Simon Unger's T-House and Thomas Gluck's Tower House are both boxes on top of oblong towers, an interesting feature of the T-House are sheets of Corten steel which is designed to rust and coats the outside of the building. Kendrick Bangs Kellogg designed the High Desert House in Joshua Tree, California with a roof made from a series of overlapping canopies creating strips of clerestory windows.The book's fifty houses all get three spreads, the first has a whole page exterior photo on the left and three smaller photos and text on the right, the next two spreads have various sized photos and informative captions. A thing I really liked about the book are the photos, because Richard Powers visited every house there is a uniform look to the four hundred photos in the book. The back pages have biographies, bibliography, a list of houses open for visits and an index.The book will interest architects, students and anyone who wants to see how the American house evolved in the last hundred years or so. Look inside the book at Westread Book Reviews then click 2020 and September.

Beautiful photography and a fresh look at some of the most classic houses in American history!

Quality book filled with beautiful and interesting photography of interiors and exteriors. For those that might be considering it for a stack of decorative placed books, I think it's helpful to know the dust cover spine is red and the book without the cover is red. This might might influence your purchase.I know it would have influenced mine.

From the title. I though this book would contain a wider variety of architectural styles. Most of the houses featured were modern. I also thought the pictures were not that good of quality and appeared dark. Unfortunately this book was not what I was looking for and definitely not worth the price.

The book is more of a coffee table book got fans of architecture but not for architects. Photos are mostly good, but there are no floor plans, so misses a scholarly dimension. Also with 300 pages, there is not a single female architect. Shame on Dominic Bradbury!

I ordered this book for my son for Christmas. He is interested in mid-century architects, and this book offers samples of the work of so many of them. He loves the book.