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Mstation Book Reviews
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Sat, 02 Sep 2006

Case Study Houses

Elizabeth A.T. Smith, Case Study Houses,
Taschen

For those interested in modernist architecture, Taschen have had a very large, quite expensive book of this title out for a while. Now there's a much smaller version in one of their inexpensive lines that's also quite cheap and much easier to store as well. The Case Study houses in question were all built in California after WWII and were an experiment in modernism and also, in many cases, in low cost building to house a burgeoning population. The "form follows function" saying of Mies van der Rowe is very much in operation with these houses and the result is sometimes quite beautiful. Here is not the place to discuss the problem of function definition which makes a lot of this style of place unliked. Anyway, if you do like, you'll certainly like the book.

The small version doesn't have complete floor plans for each house but it's still nice, with a mixture of colour and black and white photos and a writeup for each house.

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