Duck Duck Book

Tiny, tiny houses / Lester Walker.
Woodstock, N.Y. : Overlook Press, 1987.
[MCL call number: 728.37 W181t; one copy, no holds]

Walker describes some weensy houses, and provides photographs and sharp architectural drawings of each. Some of the houses are one-offs — such as Thos. Jefferson's starter house at Monticello or the little inside-out house that has everything but the bedroom on the wraparound porch — but others are designs that were used for many buildings — such as the bandbox rowhouses (three 10' x 10' rooms stacked on top of each other) of Philadelphia and the "camp" houses built for Methodist summer religious retreats around 1900. It's a nice book to leaf through as you daydream about your own tiny little castle.

n.b., Tiny, Tiny Houses was reprinted in a slightly smaller format (23 cm rather than 29 cm tall) and with a new title:

A little house of my own : 47 grand designs for 47 tiny houses / by Lester Walker.
New York : Black Dog & Leventhal, 2000.
[MCL call number: 728.37 W181L 2000; two copies, no holds]

Walker is probably most well-known for his more comprehensive work on domestic architecture in the United States, American Shelter : An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the American Home (1981, reprinted in 2002 under the title American Homes : The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Domestic Architecture; don't ask me why his books have such mutable names), which provides detailed descriptions and meticulous drawings of home types, from houses made of ice and sod to trailer homes to the fancy Victorians with gingerbread on them.

Gardens of revelation : environments by visionary artists / John Beardsley ; principal photography by James Pierce.
New York : Abbeville Press, c1995.
[MCL call number: 709.04 B368g; two copies, no holds]

Gardens of Revelation is a beautiful book of photographs of houses and yards that have been built, decorated, and embellished by their residents in their own unique and creative ways.  All of the "environments" in the book include outdoor spaces — yards, grottoes, courtyards, and gardens — and although most are in the United States, environments in Belgium, France, India, and South Africa are described as well.  There is a short, useful essay about each environment and its creator, describing the genesis of the work, the artist's philosophy and perspective on their work (if known), and the condition of the environment at the time the book was written.  Grandma Prisbey's bottle village (mentioned in booklist number 8) is included, and there are some lovely photographs of it.

There aren't very many books about this specific topic — the environments that people create for themselves, on their own terms — and this is one of my favorites.  There has been a surge of interest in "outsider," "visionary," or "naive" artists in the last dozen years or so, but most of the books available put some emphasis on works on paper, sculpture, and other movable forms.

The main part of the book is followed by two appendices, one listing organizations dedicated to environments by "visionary artists," and one listing the locations of many of the environments in the book.  There is also an extensive bibliography and a decent index.

Built by hand : vernacular buildings around the world / written by Athena Steen, Bill Steen, and Eiko Komatsu ; photographs by Yoshio Komatsu.
Salt Lake City : Gibbs Smith, c2003.
[MCL call number: 728 S814b 2003; three copies, no holds]

This big, heavy book that should probably not be put through a library book drop has more than 450 pages of photographs of dwelling places throughout the world. Each section deals with a different kind of building material — straw, mud, rocks, caves, wood, etc. — and though there is very little explanatory text, the photographs are so beautiful that it almost hurts to look at them.

Ranches, rowhouses, and railroad flats : American homes : how they shape our landscapes and neighborhoods / Christine Hunter.
New York : W.W. Norton, c1999.
[MCL call number: 728.0973 H945r 1999; two copies, no holds]

As you can see I've been going through a bit of a fascination about architecture and urban planning. Ranches and Rowhouses contains a measured analysis of how United States homes work as a feature of cities and suburbs, and how they impact the cultural, natural, and civic environment. Hunter examines what we need from our shelters, the history of how people have tried to arrange and enforce minimum standards for housing, the history and evolution of various kinds of dwelling houses (these are divided into three groups, freestanding houses, attached houses, and apartments), and how neighborhoods function and how homes and neighborhoods work together. This sounds really academic-o-rama, but Hunter's writing style is very familiar and accessible. If you're interested in this subject, you should find the book very easy to read.

The discussion of neighborhoods is very interesting. What makes a neighborhood? How do we define them when we live in them, and when they belong to other people? How do they change over time? What factors make the neighborhoods of the late 20th century so different from 100 or 200 years before? In the course of this final chapter, Hunter amplifies arguments made earlier in the book about the inward focus of dwelling reform and planning — for example, why do we have standards that require that each newly built or remodeled dwelling unit have a full bathroom, while in most places we have no requirement at all that there should be toilet facilities in outdoor public places like parks or shopping districts? And she gets down on the automobile quite a bit, especially as she points out some specifics about how everything about housing and community planning has come to be driven by the perceived need to suite every space to driving, parking, and accessibility by car.

The book is illustrated throughout with beautiful, clear line drawings of façades, floor plans, interior views, and development and neighborhood plans. The text is followed by a bibliography and index.

Sandow Birk's "In smog and thunder : historical works from the Great War of the Californias" / Sandow Birk; Tyler Stalling.
Laguna Beach, Calif. : Laguna Art Museum, 2000.
also: San Francisco, Calif. : Last Gasp, 2002.
[MCL does not have this book, but its call number would begin with 759.13]

This is the catalog from an exhibit Birk did at the Laguna Art Museum. The exhibit showed a series of pieces, primarily paintings but also works in other media, that elaborate on his fantasy of a war between Los Angeles and San Francisco. I have not even been in the same room with this book, but I am nonetheless certain that it is fascinating and worthwhile.

I heard an interview with Birk on Studio 360 (a public radio program), in which he explained the genesis of the series. He said that when he, a lifelong resident of Southern California, went to San Francisco to do some work, he noticed how much Bay Area people were down on SoCal people. They talked about it all the time, putting down LA and the southern half of the state in general, and he just couldn't understand where the animosity came from. So he started thinking about what would happen if the tension between the two parts of his state came to the ultimate test, and there was a civil war between the the two great cities. And the rest is history.

Birk has also written a film documentary entitled In Smog and Thunder : The Great War of the Californias (available in video and DVD format). You can see images of Birk's other works, including several of his series of pastoral paintings of California prisons, at his website.

Bottle houses : the creative world of Grandma Prisbrey / Melissa Eskridge Slaymaker ; illustrated by Julie Paschkis.
New York : Henry Holt, 2004.
[MCL call number: Juvenile Easy Fact Books j745.092 P959s 2004 Beginning Facts; 16 copies, no holds]

When I was a little girl, six or seven years old, my stepfather Geoffrey and his friend Robert took me with them to visit a very weird lady who lived in the middle of nowhere between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. This lady, Grandma Prisbrey (her first name is Tressa, but I was introduced to her as "Grandma") spent about 20 years building a home for herself out of things she got at the dump. She built planters and walls and walkways, but the most memorable of her creations are more than a dozen little houses, mostly made out of bottles. She laid the bottles in mortar like bricks or stones, and then filled her houses with different things she'd collected, many of them things she found at the dump. One house is filled with pencils, another with dolls, and so on. Obviously this was a very memorable outing for me.

A few weeks ago I was at work and helping a patron find a book they were looking for. I have no idea what that book was, but I do know that I did a very sloppy keyword search (bad librarian!), and among the results was this book. Wow, I thought, here's something out of my childhood being reproduced for other children.

The book itself is kind of mediocre, though still worth a look-see. It has somewhat evocative but fairly dorky illustrations, and the story is uninspired. But it does present a nice narrative of Prisbrey's life, and at the back there are photographs of Grandma Prisbrey's place, a picture of her, and a terse biography, along with information about the preservation of her work (which was severely damaged in the earthquake of 1994) presently being undertaken by the Preserve Bottle Village Committee.

I think it might be more worthwhile to go and actually visit the place, but perhaps it's a bit out of your range? I don't know.

The Rocklopedia fakebandica / T. Mike Childs ; illustrated by Jason Torchinsky.
New York : St. Martin's Griffin, c2004.
[MCL call number: 781.6603 C537r 2004; eight copies, no holds]

Have you ever wondered about lil' Opie Taylor's garage band The Sound Committee, wanted detail on Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers, or yearned to know more about The Sorels and Ellen Aim & the Attackers, the two fake bands featured in that great forgotten 80's flick Streets of Fire? You will be helped greatly by this book. It has all the deets on many a fake band, with photos.

Sadly, The Rocklopedia Fakebandica has no indexes or other supplemental finding aids, and while the author's website has similarly fascinating information, at the moment its search feature is bro-ken.