Glass House: Buildings for Open Living
By Nicky Adams
Thames & Hudson £16.95
FT bookshop price: £13.56
An imaginative use of glass can add glamour and drama to a home. And now, with technological advances allowing walls, beams, girders and staircases to be made of glass, architects are increasingly using the material to full effect in residential renovations or new-build properties.
In Glass House: Buildings for Open Living, four chapters cover topics such as indoor-outdoor living, glass as a rejuvenator of old buildings and the interplay between the material and surrounding landscapes. En route we visit 40 projects including Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Farnsworth House in Illinois, Oscar Niemeyer’s Camargo House in Rio de Janeiro, Richard Roger’s own home in Chelsea, London, and a stunning Norman Foster-designed building in the Japanese countryside.
Adams’ accessibly written text briefly describes each project, highlighting the intentions of clients and architects and showing how specific goals were achieved. The results are captured in 200 crisp, colour photographs that reveal the many ways in which glass can dramatically enhance a modern home. The book concludes with a directory of architects who could well be inundated with calls from readers of this appetite-whetting survey.
