1001 Traditional Construction Details

Rating:
Summary: A frustrating work
Review: First, by way of full disclosure, I'm a registered architect with NCARB certification and over 24 years of experience.

This book is completely frustrating. It holds such promise, or perhaps I should say the author does. He clearly knows his stuff, and there's no question that there's extremely useful information here. But anyone who knows architectural detailing knows that there are many, many aspects of construction that are not even touched on in this volume.

In all fairness, neither the author nor the publisher claim that this book is all things to all people, but with a total of 1001 details (a figure I trust is accurate - I haven't counted them), one can't help but be disappointed that over 20% of them are all related to custom cabinets, or that there are 30 different examples of window/door elevations all showing brick veneer and stone/brick lintels, with the only difference being the size of the stone. Likewise, there are something close to 20 different door head details, all showing a stone lintel of varying size, brick veneer and wood stud framing.

Please tell me what the point of this kind of padding is. Why are all of these details necessary when one or two drawings with a few carefully chosen notes can explain the various possible permutations? If you as the reader think you're going to get 1001 details of different construction conditions, you're going to be as disappointed as I was. And the frustrating part of all of this is that the details are good. Damned good. I might quibble with his point of view on text in drawings (he makes a good case for legibility of text through the use of serif fonts rather than the ones that emulate hand drawn "architectural" lettering), but then throws any notion of legibility out the window by clustering all of his notes together with no line spacing between one note and the next. Still, the drawn information is good, just not of the quantity or variety to be worthy of the title "1001...Details." I'm even wrestling with the notion of returning the book, but I'll probably keep it since it does have useful information in it, and I'm a packrat when it comes to that sort of thing. But I won't feel good about it, especially when I think of what this could have been.

Rating:
Summary: Not quite what I expected
Review: I was happy to come across this title with hopes that this was a book I could really learn from. Yet as with many other similar books the information presented in the CAD drawings are minimal and of little substance.

It is surely a waste of money to purchase the CD.

Did people forget how to actually detail buildings when they stopped drawing by hand?

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful details
Review: These may very well be the most beautifully-drawn details I have seen in a long time. Granted, there's not much here for a modernist other than some general stuff like pipe supports, signage, flashing and the like, but that's pretty obvious from the title of the book.

Rating:
Summary: don't buy it
Review: Unuseful book for traditional or classical architects.
Lost money