Where We Lived

Sample

Monica Randall

This beautifully illustrated book features the magnificent estates built in the early part of the twentieth century by the wealthy residents of Long Island's North Shore. Many of the mansions are no longer standing, making this book a critical archive and monument to their glory. In their heyday, they were inhabited by the aristocracy of America's gilded age, among them Vanderbilts, Phipps, and Pratts. The author's evocative photographs capture the splendor of these once luxurious homes, from the houses' turrets, porticos, columns, and courtyards to their vaulted entry halls, spacious ballrooms, and vast libraries. Accompanied by histories of the estates and the families that built them, this book is a classic and evocative reminder of a bygone era and lifestyle. --Publisher description.

Sample

photography by N. Jane Iseley

Architecture has been defined as "the gift of one generation to the next." In the South Carolina Low Country the gift is a particularly precious one-a rich treasure of buildings that not only charm us with their graceful beauty, but offer us a glimpse into a vanished world of prosperous plantations and provincial aristocracy.

Sample

Joan Potter Loveless

This reminiscence of the lives and work of three craftswomen covers a period of some forty years. Joan Potter Loveless came to Taos in the early 1950s fresh out of Black Mountain College where she had studied weaving with Anni Albers. When she and her artist husband and baby daughter arrived in their Model A convertible they did not suspect that they would establish a relationship with the region that would pull them back again and again. Loveless's life became. Intertwined with that of her friends Rachel Brown and Kristina Wilson. They shared with her a love for the New Mexico landscape, their work as weavers and spinners, and the joys and sorrows of children and grandchildren. In addition to the story of their friendship, this is the story of the evolution of their work--a relationship with wool that is unique to each weaver but for each intimately related to Northern New Mexico. As their careers developed they participated in. Craft co-ops, educational programs, and commercial ventures, including Tierra Wools in Los Ojos, New Mexico, and Weaving Southwest in Taos. Anyone who has ever made a living as a craftsperson or thought about doing so will delight in Joan Loveless's thoughtful evocation of this way of life. Loveless beautifully captures the spirit of Taos valley, the texture of daily life, and the challenge of the creative process. Anyone with an interest in the culture of the Southwest. Or the history of the Taos art colony will enjoy Three Weavers.

Sample

Witold Rybczynski

"Before Andrea Palladio began designing his simple, gracious, perfectly proportioned villas, architectural genius was reserved for temples and palaces. Palladio elevated the architecture of the private house into an art form, and he not only designed and built, he wrote. His late-sixteenth-century architectural treatises were read and studied by great thinkers as diverse as Thomas Jefferson and Inigo Jones, profoundly influencing the design of Monticello, the tidewater plantation houses of Virginia, and the White House. All across America today, Palladio's influence is evident in ample porches and columned porticoes, in grand ceiling heights and front-door pediments.". "In The Perfect House, Witold Rybczynski, whose books on domestic and landscape architecture have transformed our understanding of parks and buildings, looks at Palladio's famous villas, not with the eye of an art historian but with the eye of an architect. He wanted to know why a handful of houses in an obscure corner of the Venetian Republic should have made their presence felt hundreds of years later and halfway across the globe."--BOOK JACKET.