Spring Forward With New Books on Design

By Stephani L. Miller

Book publishers are releasing a fresh crop of new titles about home and other design topics in time for spring. We've collected an assortment here:

More Not So Big Solutions for Your Home (Taunton Press, $22.95), architect Sarah Susanka's latest installment in the Not So Big series, is a creative resource for homeowners, designers, and remodelers, offering a variety of practical solutions to everyday home design challenges. The book gathers together several articles Susanka, FAIA, originally wrote for Inspired House and Fine Homebuilding magazines, organized into helpfully focused chapters. Susanka includes sketches and floor plan examples to illustrate her concepts.

Architectural historian Roulhac B. Toledano presents the buildings and neighborhoods of New Orleans as they once were and, in his opinion, as they should be in A Pattern Book of New Orleans Architecture (Pelican Publishing, $29.95). A tribute to the city's rich architectural history, the book examines each of the many housing types in detail, including the characteristic elements of each architectural style, authentic materials, and original building techniques, as well as information about the surveyors and engineers who designed the city. Numerous nineteenth-century gouache and watercolor archival drawings and paintings, photographs, and neighborhood plans illustrate the pages.

The first book to focus on the country house commissions of Gilded-Age architects Robert Swain Peabody and John Goddard Stearns Jr., according to the publisher, Peabody & Stearns Country Houses and Seaside Cottages (W.W. Norton, $65) by Annie Robinson catalogs more than 80 of the pair's resort and leisure designs around the United States. More than 200 illustrations, archival photos, plans, and drawings help tell the story of their successful partnership, while granting a glimpse into the social and economic vitality that marked the era.

The Hybrid Electric Home: Clean – Efficient – Profitable (Schiffer Books, $24.99) by Craig Toepfer explains how using a combination of renewable sources to generate electrical power on an individual basis for homes and businesses can help reduce reliance on power companies, improve efficiency, reduce waste, create jobs, and increase economic security. The book also offers a comprehensive survey of how the United States' electric power generation industry began and evolved.

Design public relations expert Mary Anne Piccirillo explores today's most popular and cutting-edge surfacing materials for countertops in The Countertop Book (Schiffer Books, $29.99), including various stones, metals, and wood species, as well as glass, concrete, and repurposed materials. While offering more than 390 color images of innovative countertop features and installations for inspiration, Piccirillo also discusses the pros and cons of each material.

A handy gift for friends and colleagues of architects, as well as for design enthusiasts, Talk About Contemporary Architecture (Flammarion, $24.95) by journalist and architecture expert Gilles de Bure offers a practical primer and accessible introduction to architecture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book highlights 30 essential dates that changed the face of architecture, identifies the movers and shakers in architecture who have driven many of the key movements, and provides a glossary of contemporary architecture's vocabulary.

In Modern North: Architecture on the Frozen Edge (Princeton Architectural Press, $45), author Julie Decker seeks to redefine design and building above 60 degrees latitude as being both responsive to place and aesthetically provocative. An exploration of ingenious architectural solutions to geographic extremes, the book presents 34 of the most compelling examples of contemporary residential and institutional architecture in the far North, from Canada to Scandinavia to Alaska. Decker, director of the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage, Alaska, discusses the work of established and up-and-coming architects, including a-lab, David Chipperfield, Jarmund/Vigsnæs, Studio Granda, Shim-Sutcliffe, and Snøhetta.