Earth Sheltered Designs

Rating:
Summary: Just pack some earth against a typical house...
Review: I was very disapointed with this book. First, it was only plans with no supplemental info. Second, most of the designs looked like something you'd see in any other house plan book, but with some dirt pushed around the sides and a thin layer raked across the top. That's it! They're mostly rectangular, which is boring. Even if you built one into a hill instead of just doing the dirt comb-over, they'd still be boring. And small. The few seemingly innovative designs were way too small to even consider. Imagine a bedroom that is 8x11 in cross-measurements, except that it's actually a pie shape taken out of a very small hexagonal structure!

The "underground" house/structure books tend to be way more cool than "earth-sheltered" or "earth-bermed" house books. Keep looking. I may make a list of my favorite underground books......

Rating:
Summary: Great book for the potential homebuilder.
Review: I'm no architect and this is a book I borrowed from the bookshelf of my brother who is an architect. How many technical books is a layman going to bother to pick up. This gives a great feel for the possibilities of earth sheltered design under differing climatic conditions. If you are interested in the concept you could do worse than to start with this book. I am attracted to earth sheltered design for it's energy efficiency and it's low impact on the landscape, but as a design perspective you have to rate it before you can reject it. I just hate all the energy wasted on heating and cooling when we can use nature to do most of that for us without killing the planet in the process.

Rating:
Summary: Great book for the potential homebuilder.
Review: I'm no architect and this is a book I borrowed from the bookshelf of my brother who is an architect. How many technical books is a layman going to bother to pick up. This gives a great feel for the possibilities of earth sheltered design under differing climatic conditions. If you are interested in the concept you could do worse than to start with this book. I am attracted to earth sheltered design for it's energy efficiency and it's low impact on the landscape, but as a design perspective you have to rate it before you can reject it. I just hate all the energy wasted on heating and cooling when we can use nature to do most of that for us without killing the planet in the process.

Rating:
Summary: Basic designs......no frills.
Review: This book did give me some new ideas but not many. I was disappointed that were no hillside designs, most of the designs were for flat landscapes. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the scale of the drawings, it would be nice if there was some consistency that you could easily cut and tape your own design using two or more drawings. At the very least each drawing should have a scale included. One or two sentences about the pro's and con's of each design would also be helpful. Good place to start.....no frills.