Homing Instinct: Using Your Lifestyle to Design and Build Your Home - Hardcover

Connell, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446516074 ISBN 13: 9780446516075

Publisher: Grand Central Pub, 1993

Synopsis

An illustrated guide to home planning, design, and construction demystifies the process and takes readers step-by-step through each stage in the creation of a house, including framing, roofing, window installation, and electricity

About this title

Review

If the idea of a new house is an interesting possibility, but not yet something that occupies a large number of your waking hours, which of the several hundred books at your local bookstore will be the most helpful? To get you started, read John Connell's "Homing Instinct: Using Your Lifestyle to Design and Build Your Home (McGraw-Hill, 1998). The author is both an architect and the founder of Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Warren, Vermont (www.yestermorrow.org). The school runs intensive workshops in design and construction for both professionals and non-professionals. Intended for a lay audience, Connell's book is free of jargon, and his writing is so engaging you will find yourself reading about foundations and framing with great interest, if not gusto. The sections on The Site and The Building (with chapter headings like "Walls and Wallness" and "What Works and What Doesn't: Looking at the Interconnected Effects of Gravity, Temperature, Moisture and Ethics") will be more riveting after your house starts to go up, and you want to understand what you're looking at. At the beginning stages of your new house project, the section called "The Program" will be more helpful. To arrive at the right design for you, Connell says, you need to start with the big cosmic questions -- Who are you? Who would you like to be? -- and then gradually home in on a real house. The "Bubbles and Storyboard: Diagramming Your Program" chapter walks you through how to make a bubble diagram. Most architects in their initial discussions use these with clients to illustrate various functional relationships and how the house might relate to the site. Many architects will caution against thinkingabout a design before you have a building site, but I think working out which spaces are more important to you and which ones are less so will make the architect's job easier. And once you've established what the spaces and their relationships are, these can be physically configured in any number of ways, depending on the building site you end up with.

From the Author

What's so NEW about the new HOMING INSTINCT?
Although it contains extensive information on planning, design and construction the new HOMING INSTINCT is really quite different from its predecessor or any other how-to books. The aspects of this book that set it apart are:

1. The material is organized chronologically. It starts with the land (or pre-existing structure) and then explores the reader's needs and the design process before getting into the nuts & bolts. Throughout the book the reader is offered design and construction choices so that they can make decisions based on their own personal values and lifestyle.

2. The book grew out of 15 years of teaching at the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Warren, VT. This is the only design school for non-professionals and the only construction school for architects that I know of. HOMING INSTINCT is a compilation of the material that is covered in the school's core curriculum.

3. The book presents "green" and "sustainable" methodologies right along side of conventional choices. While the author's preferences are clear, there is no black and white dogma dished out here.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Pub
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0446516074
• ISBN 13: 9780446516075
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English