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Books : Professional & Technical : Architecture : Building Types & Styles : General
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Comprehensive and up-to-date-
the classic visual guide to the basics of building construction
For twenty-five years, Building Construction Illustrated has offered an outstanding introduction to the principles of building construction. Now this Third Edition has been expertly revised and updated to address the latest advances in materials, building technology, and code requirements.
Complete with more than 1,000 illustrations, the book moves through each of the key stages of the design process, from site selection to building components, mechanical systems, and finishes. Topics within each chapter are organized according to the CSI MasterFormat(TM), making the book extremely easy to use.
Special features of this edition include integrated coverage of environmentally friendly materials, sustainable building construction strategies, and ADA requirements, as well as the inclusion of both metric and standard U.S. measurements throughout the book.
With its clear presentation of the basic concepts underlying building construction, Building Construction Illustrated, Third Edition equips students and professionals in all areas of architecture and construction with useful guidelines for approaching virtually any new materials or techniques they may encounter in building planning, design, and construction.
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The most thorough and concise guide to hanging drywall available. This revised edition features new material, additional pages and color photographs. With more than 87,000 copies sold, Drywall is a mainstay of any comprehensive home-building library.
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Now in its Fourth Edition, Fundamentals of Building Construction is an essential textbook that has been used by thou-sands of students annually in schools of architecture, engineering, and construction technology. The best-selling reference focuses on the basic materials and methods used in building construction. Emphasizing common construction systems such as light wood frames, masonry bearing walls, steel frames, and reinforced concrete, the new edition includes new coverage of green design and energy-efficient construction energies, and is based on the International Building Code(r).
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Here for the first time is a complete visual handbook designed for architects, builders, students, and anyone else interested in wood-frame construction. Inside you'll find hundreds of meticulous drawings illustrating every detail you might ever want to know about when building wood, whether you're building basement walls or framing a chimney opening.This wealth of visual information is mined from actual jobsites. Special attention is given throughout to durability and to energy efficiency.
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Heating water with the sun is almost as old as humankind itself, and it is done all over the world. Yet there are strangely few resources on the topic in North America.
Solar Water Heating fills this gap. It reviews the history of solar water and space heating systems from prehistory to the present, then presents the basics of solar water heating, including an introduction to modern solar energy systems, energy conservation and energy economics. Drawing on the author's experience as an installer of these systems, the book goes on to cover:
- Types of solar collectors, solar water and space heating systems and solar pool heating systems, including their advantages and disadvantages
- System components, their installation, operation, and maintenance
- System sizing and siting
- Choosing the appropriate system.
Since people often get turned off by the up-front cost, the book focuses especially on the financial aspects of solar water or space heating systems, clearly showing that such systems can save significant costs in the long run. Well-illustrated, the book is designed for a wide readership from the curious to the student or professional.
Bob Ramlow is the solar thermal consultant for the Wisconsin Focus on Energy Program. The owner of a renewable energy company, he has over 30 years experience with solar energy systems and is a founder and director of the Midwest Renewable Energy Association (MREA). Benjamin Nusz currently works as a solar water heating consultant and site assessor in Wisconsin.
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-- Discusses all aspects of laying foundations, raising walls, and more for small or one-person crews
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The greatest humanitarian challenge we face today is that of providing shelter. Currently one in seven people lives in a slum or refugee camp, and more than 3,000,000,000 people--nearly half the world's population--do not have access to clean water or adequate sanitation. The physical design of our homes, neighborhoods and communities shapes every aspect of our lives. Yet too often architects are desperately needed in the places where they can least be afforded.Edited by Architecture for Humanity and now on its third printing, Design Like You Give a Damn is a compendium of innovative projects from around the world that demonstrate the power of design to improve lives. The first book to bring the best of humanitarian architecture and design to the printed page, Design Like You Give a Damn offers a history of the movement toward socially conscious design, and showcases more than 80 contemporary solutions to such urgent needs as basic shelter, healthcare, education and access to clean water, energy and sanitation.Design Like You Give a Damn is an indispensable resource for designers and humanitarian organizations charged with rebuilding after disaster and engaged in the search for sustainable development. It is also a call to action to anyone committed to building a better world. (20061116)
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What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities.
The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.
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This complete volume shows beginning, amateur and advanced to-it-yourselfers everything they need to know about home plumbing. It includes complete how-to information on basic skills, major renovation, and the installation of all-new plumbing systems - the only consumer book to cover the subject matter this comprehensively. DIY plumbing offers the best cost-savings of any home improvement project. Homeowners who perform their own plumbing repairs and installation using this book can easily save hundreds or even thousands of dollars on major projects.As a major revision of America's best-selling plumbing book, this edition has been updated to comply with the most recent code changes; and has added material on servicing well pumps, installing water filters, fixing water softeners, and installing drip irrigation.
Here's why you owe it to yourself to buy this book:
** Suitable for do-it-yourselfers of all levels - beginning to advanced - with more than 650 color photos that make all directions easy to understand.
** It's updated from the previous edition to meet the requirements of the latest Uniform Plumbing Code and to show the latest styles from major manufacturers of sinks, faucets, and plumbing materials.
** Includes complete sections on replacing an outdated plumbing system entirely.
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From the most basic solutions to advanced, energy-saving projects, no book covers home insulation and weatherization like this one. Homeowners will learn how best to keep their homes warm in winter, cool in summer and weather-tight all year long.
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Passive solar heating and passive cooling—approaches known as natural conditioning—provide comfort throughout the year by reducing, or eliminating, the need for fossil fuel. Yet while heat from sunlight and ventilation from breezes is free for the taking, few modern architects or builders really understand the principles involved.Now Dan Chiras, author of the popular book "The Natural House," brings those principles up to date for a new generation of solar enthusiasts.
In "The Solar House," Chiras sets the record straight on the vast potential for passive heating and cooling. Acknowledging the good intentions of misguided solar designers in the past, he highlights certain egregious erros and shows how to avoid them. More importantly, Chiras explains in methodical detail how today’s home builders can succeed with solar designs.
Readers will learn:
- How to select a cost-effective, energy-efficient, and environmentally friendly backup heating system.
- how to preserve indoor air quality in an airtight, energy-efficient home.
- ways of employing green building materials in a naturally conditioned home.
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Wind energy today is a booming worldwide industry. The technology has truly come of age, with better, more reliable machinery and a greater understanding of how and where wind power makes sense--from the independent homestead to a grid-connected utility-wide perspective. Heightened concerns about our environment mean that this resurgence of interest in wind--a natural and widespread power source--is here to stay. Wind Power is the completely revised and expanded edition of Paul Gipe's definitive 1993 book, Wind Power for Home and Business. In addition to expanded sections on gauging wind resources and siting wind turbines, this edition includes new examples and case studies of successful wind systems, international sources for new and used equipment, and hundreds of color photographs and illustrations.
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An earth-sheltered, earth-roofed home has the least impact upon the land of all housing styles, leaving almost zero footprint on the planet.
Earth-Sheltered Houses is a practical guide for those who want to build their own underground home at moderate cost. It describes the benefits of sheltering a home with earth, including the added comfort and energy efficiency from the moderating influence of the earth on the home's temperature (keeping it warm in the winter and cool in the summer), along with the benefits of low maintenance and the protection against fire, sound, earthquake, and storm afforded by the earth. Extra benefits from adding an earth or other living roof option include greater longevity of the roof substrate, fine aesthetics, and environmental harmony.
The book covers all of the various construction techniques involved, including details on planning, excavation, footings, floor, walls, framing, roofing, waterproofing, insulation, and drainage. Specific methods appropriate for the inexperienced owner/builder are a particular focus and include:
- Pouring one's own footings and/or floor
- The use of dry-stacked (surface-bonded) concrete block walls
- Post-and-beam framing
- Plank-and-beam roofing
- Drainage methods and self-adhesive waterproofing membranes
The time-tested, easy-to-learn construction techniques described in Earth-Sheltered Houses will enable readers to embark upon their own building projects with confidence, backed up by a comprehensive resources section that lists all the latest products such as waterproofing membranes, types of rigid insulation, and drainage products that will protect the building against water damage and heat loss.
Rob Roy is a former contractor with 27 years of experience and 12 previous books to his credit, including Cordwood Building and Timber Framing for the Rest of Us. An expert on underground building, he founded the Earthwood Building School in 1981 with his wife, Jaki, and is frequently a speaker at events throughout North America.
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Are you ready for the Cob Cottage? This is a building method so old and so simple that it has been all but forgotten in the rush to synthetics. A cob cottage,cobb, however, might be the ultimate expression of ecological design, a structure so attuned to its surroundings that its creators refer to it as "an ecstatic house."
The authors build a house the way others create a natural garden. They use the oldest, most available materials imaginable—earth, clay, sand, straw, and water—and blend them to redefine the future (and past) of building. Cob (the word comes from an Old English root, meaning "lump") is a mixture of non-toxic, recyclable, and often free materials. Building with cob requires no forms, no cement, and no machinery of any kind. Builders actually sculpt their structures by hand.
Building with earth is nothing new to America; the oldest structures on the continent were built with adobe bricks. Adobe, however, has been geographically limited to the Southwest. The limits of cob are defined only by the builder's imagination.
Cob offers answers regarding our role in Nature, family and society, about why we feel the ways that we do, about what's missing in our lives. Cob comes as a revelation, a key to a saner world.
Cob has been a traditional building process for millennia in Europe, even in rainy and windy climates like the British Isles, where many cob buildings still serve as family homes after hundreds of years. The technique is newly arrived to the Americas, and, as with so many social trends, the early adopters are in the Pacific Northwest.
Cob houses (or cottages, since they are always efficiently small by American construction standards) are not only compatible with their surroundings, they ARE their surroundings, literally rising up from the earth. They are full of light, energy-efficient, and cozy, with curved walls and built-in, whimsical touches. They are delightful. They are ecstatic.
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The green building movement has come a long way in a short time. Responding to this exponential growth, with its attendant technological as well as aesthetic developments, Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Deliver, Second Edition guides construction and design professionals through the process of developing commercial and institutional high-performance green buildings in today's marketplace.In this revised edition, Charles Kibert delivers a detailed, and passionate, overview of the entire process of green building, covering the theory, history, state of the industry, and best practices in green building. Kibert uses not only the dominant LEED assessment system, but includes such newer ones as Green Globes and several noteworthy building assessment systems from other countries. Sections introduce the background of the green building movement and walk you through such aspects as the background of high-performance green building design, green-building assessment, the green building process, and ecological design.
Broad enough to cover the needs of faculty and students in architecture, engineering, landscape architecture, interior design, and construction management, yet focused enough to serve as a reference for building owners and buyers of construction services, Sustainable Construction is a comprehensive look at an emerging process that is environmentally sounds while making good economic sense.
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Architecture at the dawn of the 21st century: the indispensable compendium This two-volume compilation brings together highlights from TASCHEN's groundbreaking title Building a New Millennium and the first four volumes of our renowned Architecture Now! books for a comprehensive study of architecture around the world at the beginning of the 21st century. Up-and-coming architects?tomorrow's superstars?are featured alongside the field's most respected practitioners, such as Santiago Calatrava, Herzog & de Meuron, Koolhaas/OMA, Daniel Libeskind, Richard Meier, Oscar Niemeyer, and Jean Nouvel.