Books About Houses: A Handful Of Madeleines
Five books recommended for anyone who is buying a house, who already owns a house, who lives, has lived or might someday live in a house, who has ever played house, …
Why Read About Building Houses?
First, none of these books falls in the Do-It-Yourself Project genre. Nor are they polemical tracts about ecologically sustainable homes, instruction manuals for negotiating the purchase or sale of real estate, or catalogs of architectural design.
They do offer utilitarian value by providing the reader with a database and vocabulary sufficient for discussions with professionals engaged in building, designing, remodeling, repairing, buying, or selling ones home. And it does assuage ones anxiety to know that, for example, querying the grizzled old coot at the local Ace Hardware about their stud finders won’t occasion snorts of derisive laughter.
They also contain a batch of tips that will astound ones friends and prevent any number of unnecessary hassles.1
In the long run, however, the most significant contribution of these volumes is enlightening the reader about how an important aspect of our contemporary world functions.
And, by my lights, these books are better written, more entertaining, and supply more drama and humor than the majority of books on the New York Times bestseller list.
Why These Five Books?
I was originally motivated to begin reading books about building homes by the realization that, as was true of so many other areas of knowledge, I knew too little to even ask a cogent question. After several years and many titles, I’ve found these five to be the best of breed. There are areas of overlap, but each of these volumes provides something unique.
Home: A Short History of an Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
In an extended essay, Rybczynski describes the evolution of the concept of a home from filthy, uncomfortable medieval dwellings inhabited by several families to the contemporary notion of a private retreat with its emphasis on comfort.
While Home: A Short History of an Idea offers only the occasional detail about construction, it provides a surprisingly useful conceptual framework for understanding everything from traffic flow through the rooms to the positioning of the most comfortable chair in front of the fireplace.
House 
by Tracy Kidder
Tracy Kidder, in the style he debuted in The Soul Of A New Machine, uses the story of a couple building a suburban home as an Everyman’s epic journey, the final destination of which is a completed home.
The conflicts between the owners, the builders, & the architect are intriguing, entertaining, and instructive. While it would be easy to attribute the problems to the fact that, as more than one reviewer has pointed out, the owners are — to revert to the vernacular of the 1980s — Yuppie scum, the frictions are inherent in the situation, regardless of the specific players. It will prove no surprise to anyone who has purchased a house that the owners want perfection at a low cost, the builder wants to do decent work and be well compensated, and the architect wants everyone to cooperate to build the house as he designed it.
But the owners really are Yuppie scum.
The Well-Built House 
by James Locke
It’s a convenient segue from Kidder’s book to this one since the author of The WellBuilt House, James Locke, was also the head builder in House. Locke provides a been there/done that guided tour of building a house. The content is clear, useful, and clever and his writing style as spare and craftsmanlike as his building technique. I especially admire his capacity to provide an opinion (his preference, say, for a masonry chimney rather than a metal lined firebox) without booby-trapping it with condescension.
The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person’s Guide to How a House Works 
by David Owen
Owen’s writing is also accomplished, as one might expect given that he routinely writes for, among other publications, The New Yorker. This book is the story of the transition of Owen, his two children, and his wife from residing in a Manhattan apartment to surviving in a 200 year old Connecticut farmhouse. While Owen does, on occasion, succumb to the temptation to go for the easy laugh (and who can blame him?) by recalling one or another remodeling catastrophe cum epiphany, he does so in an manner that is sympathetic rather than pitiable or slapstick. It’s also instructive. The key is that Owen, who at the outset, is, thank goodness, as ignorant as I was when I picked up his book, is also a skilled researcher who can assimilate information, evaluate its validity, and present it in a clear, succinct manner.
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built 
by Stewart Brand
Yep, it’s that Stewart Brand, the guy behind The Whole Earth Catalog and founder of CoEvolution Quarterly (now Whole Earth Review ). And, this book does have more than a trace of populist, anti-establishment sentiment, but this doesn’t get in the way of a bevy of useful ideas about building. Brand marshals a lucid text joined to illustrative photos and drawings to support his contention that houses (as well as commercial buildings) change over time in adaptation to the inhabitants’ style and habits, the particular uses to which they are put, and the aging of their own materials and designs. He goes on to argue that owners can benefit by treating the house as a “Darwinian mechanism” and taking charge of their own surroundings. I can’t resist quoting from a booksellers description that summarizes the book perfectly: His crunchy-granola insights bristle with an undeniable pragmatism.
Footnote
- Such hassles typically fall into the Everyone knows …, You did … , didn’t you?, or Why did you have [a former workman] do it that way categories. E.g., The current workman (AKA the expert post facto) sneers something on the lines of
Everyone knows you have to frame the gable vents with 1/8-inch clearance.
You did use a semitransparent penetrating oil-based stain on those shakes, didn’t you?
Why did you have your plumber install a 1.5 inch kitchen drain instead of a 2 inch? ~back~
