House Rules: An Architect's Guide to Modern Life

The photos speak for themselves. The captions are succinct. The rules provoke creativity.

Love this book-- great ( and practical ) principles but easy to understand!

Great content both classic and modernist

Really ;like the way book is laid out.

Terribly written. Just loaded with buzzwords and eccentric houses. Some pictures are repeated in the book. Don’t waste your time.

This book painstakingly conceptualizes so-called "rules" for the process of house building. However, in the Afterword written by Marc Leff, he admits that "the entire premise of this book is a bit tongue-in-cheek". Captions are those meaningless/tacky "inspirational" quotes which you often see on Facebook and Instagram photos. For example, "Order complements the unpredictable", "Necessity yields elegance", "A house is incomplete until occupied", etc. I wondered for a sec if I got this book from the motivational book section. I can see Berke's core ideas there, and the architecture presented in this book is undeniably stunning, but still, they are overshadowed by the poor editing.

Good book to read.

The book reads as if a charlatan was given an assignment to find images of architecture and add extravagant meaningless language in the margins. The author fails hard at sounding profound. She uses every type of Pseudo-profundity: deepities, trite-nalogies, stating the obvious, contradicting yourself, and jargon. I wanted to like the book but it's so poorly done. There were even two identical images four pages apart. You had one job Deborah! Maybe the author is a decent architect, but on paper it appears she is likely a better con artist.

It's great quality and sound advice but not many words for a book that's quite expensive.