Description: For reasons both obvious and mysterious, even as our cultural and social constructions of domesticity change, the house remains a fundamental site for advancing modern architectural theory and practice: because it accommodates a full diurnal and annual cycle of life, and because it intricately stages ritual and routine, this most private of programs has become a medium of publicity and polemic.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a House both participates in and critiques this contemporary tradition. The reader's attention in this examination is directed not only to LEVENBETTS' houses, but to all houses, and all parts of houses--pieces of home and rhetorics of domesticity that show up in our collective memory: from a stolen moment on a staircase in a John Cassavetes film, to the sturdy knife-edged contractor modernism of suburban late to mid-twentieth-century America. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a House is an accessible and universal book--everyone has a sense of home. The book includes thirteen texts on domestic pieces that make up the house, comparative diagrams, construction metrics and anecdotes, informal photos, and structural details all in the interest of taking the house apart in order to put it back together.Brief description: Stella Betts is a principal at LEVENBETTS with her partner David Leven. She is currently an adjunct professor at Yale University School of Architecture. Stella serves on the board of directors of the Architectural League of New York.
Review Quotes: "From diagram to type, from thickness to thinness, and from raw material to elaborate details, the book thoughtfully dismantles what it means to make a book as much as it takes apart the domestic structures that are its subject. In doing so, it also reveals to us how lessons from a simple house may yet have wider and far-reaching implications, whether confronting buildings of larger program, sites of urban complexity, or narratives of greater consequence." --Nader Teharini, Architectural Record