The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie

The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie

Even the cost of a publication The Language Of Houses: How Buildings Speak To Us, By Alison Lurie is so inexpensive; many individuals are actually thrifty to allot their cash to acquire guides. The other factors are that they really feel bad and also have no time to visit guide store to look the book The Language Of Houses: How Buildings Speak To Us, By Alison Lurie to read. Well, this is modern-day era; a lot of books can be got easily. As this The Language Of Houses: How Buildings Speak To Us, By Alison Lurie and also more books, they can be got in extremely fast means. You will not should go outdoors to obtain this publication The Language Of Houses: How Buildings Speak To Us, By Alison Lurie

The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie

Free Ebook PDF The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie

In the 1980 s, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alison Lurie wrote a meditation on clothing as an expression of history, social status and individual psychology. The Language of Clothes (Random House) came to be highly regarded in the literature of couture and design.

Lurie has returned with The Language of Houses, a provocative and entertaining journey through the architecture of houses and buildings and the divided spaces within come to reflect the attitudes and purposes of the organizations and people who inhabit them.

What makes a house is in the eye of the beholder, and the word can mean anything from church to office to domicile and more and relies on the use of materials such as stone and wood and stucco and the roles of stairs and windows, tight interiors and open expanses.

Structures discussed are: schools, churches, government building, museums, prisons, hospitals, restaurants, and of course, houses and homes.

Filled with literary references and charming hand-drawings, Lurie s new work will appeal to fans of Bill Bryson s At Home, as well as provoke wide review attention for this award-winning author."

The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2035032 in Books
• Published on: 2015-09-08
• Released on: 2015-09-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 7.90" h x 1.00" w x 5.20" l, .0 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 308 pages

The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie

Review “The Language of Houses…. makes a powerful argument that how we choose to order the space we live and work in reveals far more about us.… full of mischievous apercus, and Ms. Lurie at her best is bracingly subversive….a mine of adroit observation, uncovering apparently humdrum details to reveal their unexpected, and occasionally poignant, human meaning.” (Wall Street Journal)“. . . A book meticulously packed with facts, paradoxes and observations. . . . a rich compendium of information, exploring how we inhabit our homes, our offices and our places of learning, leisure and worship, from every conceivable angle, in neatly organized chapters addressing each category of building.” (Seattle Times)“Lurie maintains a light touch with such damning observations. . . One of the book’s best chapters treats public high schools. . . .its insights into our vanity, and capacity for almost negligent public construction, are ripe for the gleaning.” (Boston Globe)“Allusions to the work of Charlotte Brontë, Tom Wolfe, Joyce Carol Oates and Michael Lewis…(Lurie) takes a broad look at the design of museums, residences, schools, prisons and restaurants — to name a few of the featured categories — and how they have evolved over time…“The Language of Houses” is light and breezy.” (Washington Post)“The Language of Houses has every quality you would expect from a work by Alison Lurie: intelligence, authority, wit and charm.” (Louis Begley)“Alison Lurie, in her lucid, jargon-free way, allows us to read what architecture is saying. She has culled the best ideas from a vast secondary literature and passed it all through the sieve of her brilliant mind.” (Edmund White)“There's much to absorb in this sequel to Alison Lurie's The Language of Clothes, but The Language of Houses is an extraordinarily absorbing book—it wears its learning lightly, holding this reader's attention the way a fine novel does. I was particularly fascinated by the linked chapters on religious buildings and museums.” (James McConkey)

About the Author Alison Lurie has published ten books of fiction - including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Foreign Affairs and five books of non-fiction. She is professor of English Emeritus at Cornell.

Where to Download The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie

Most helpful customer reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful. A Most Disappointing Book By Janet Perry If I say the word house, what comes to mind?Probably a place where a person or a family lives.Unhappily, Lurie seems to think that this word encompasses every sort of building, from museums to you office cubicle.That could be why she spends almost 60% of the book on them. So what you & I mean by 'house" is not the focus of the book.That's the first problem.The second problem is the book shows Lurie's prejudices as a boarding-school-educated New Yorker because she doesn't like: housing developments, commerce, overweight people, or folks who live in the West. Rarely does she talk about architectural styles of the West. She has little but contempt for the tastes of the middle class, verbally sneering at sectionals and overstuffed recliners.That wouldn't be quite so bad if she didn't show a lack of research about many things. While she's quick to identify several styles of churches, she seems completely unaware of many significant styles of churches, something easily remedied.When talking about housing developments, which she obviously dislikes, she completely ignores two highly significant historical, architectural and social movements that lead to our current state: the rise of bungalows in the first half of the 20th Century, and the explosion of suburbia after World War II. Both these developments importantly led to our current ideas about houses and the dream of home ownership. And, importantly, the trends made these things possible not for just the middle class, but for the working class, a group of people Lurie ignores.To make matters worse, her supposed analysis is all on the surface. It was bad enough in the early chapters of the book, when she actually talked about houses, but as the book continues she increasingly gives the readers only descriptions. Nothing really about what these things might mean.I was so disappointed in this book, because her previous "language" book, The Language of Clothes, was great. I think had Lurie actually focused deeply on houses and only on houses, perhaps there could have been something there, but given a level of analysis barely above one of her students, I think it might have been too big a subject for her.Don't waste your time.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful. A great companion book to Bill Bryson's At Home By Vermont USA I was drawn to this book because it was compared to Bill Bryson's At Home. I found this one a bit breezier and broader than Bryson’s focus on the house through history. Lurie touches on all the buildings in our lives, from schools to museums and more. This is a companionable book for anyone interested in the meaning of everyday life as seen through the eyes of architecture.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. A fascinating, eye-opening read. By Peter Agrafiotis I found The Language of Houses fascinating. I’d never realized how many powerful or subtle messages can be conveyed by varieties of rooms, arrangements within them, and by the surrounding whole of the structure. I was especially taken with Ms. Lurie’s repeated invoking of sociological and psychological issues relating to status, a factor of life we don’t often talk of directly today in our supposed classless society. Ms. Lurie shows us that the environments we create speak truths we hesitate to admit in words. I have read all of Alison Lurie’s novels and I find her clear and direct non-fiction style – enlivened further with satisfyingly humorous asides to the reader – presents her font of ideas and well-researched facts in as stimulating (or else soothing) a manner as descriptions of atmospheres, characters and characters’ motives in her novels. The Language of Houses well met my standard of a good read in non-fiction: encouraging me to look at things around me in a new way, to think of things I hadn’t before.

See all 18 customer reviews... The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie

---

The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie PDF
The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie iBooks
The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie ePub
The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie rtf
The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie AZW
The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie Kindle

The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie

The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie

The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie

The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, by Alison Lurie