Modern Shoestring: Contemporary Architecture on a Budget

I found this book extremely helpful, since it's rare for architectural books to feature modern homes that people can afford, let alone design in such a way that is livable. The floor plans and photographs seemed especially well laid out and many of the homes offered interesting and accessible ideas for either the modern home owner or small architectural firm. I wish more books were printed that had that focus. An excellent guide.

This book resides in a narrow category often ignored in the design profession: Moderate Cost equating High Value. The commentary in the book is indeed light at best, I would have wished for more. However what is expressed is that those of us whom reside in perhaps the largest representative economic group of the middle class can strive for design. The selection of projects is diverse and shows a range of styles, material aspirations and building sites. Much like design itself there is less of a uniform theme of design in exchange for a display of what can only be imagined as designer and client relationships manifesting themselves in works that loosely fall into the category of Modern. There is the refined, the quirky, the bare etc. etc. a democracy of sorts. What is perhaps the most successful part of this collection of homes is that they appear at least in photos to be without the usual pretense of glamour and wealth often reserve for the coffee table collection.

Pictures are nice, it had small blurbs in an overarching concept for each house example. However, I was expecting more how-to and less show & kinda tell.

My greatest disappointment with this book is one of a lack of value. After reading the book several times I searched for each architect online. With few exceptions, most of the information presented on each architect's Web site was repeated in the book. The photographs looked much better online - many of them in the book were muddy in tone, much darker than online (yes, a monitor has a distinct advantage, but not to the point where this book came up short), and several of the images reproduced in the book were enlarged way past an acceptable size for their resolution. The text accompanying could have been far more descriptive of the theme of the book - how these homes were built on a budget. And, how the reader might design and spec a building themselves. Although I have never authored a book, it seems like there was little effort in compiling the information presented here. To its credit, this book does include a complete floorplan for each house. I think that the point of this book could have been accomplished by a Web site. In fact, the author should have included Web site addresses for each of the architects, and the architects could have provided additional information on what is a commodity in short supply - value-oriented design. [...]