Building with Vision: Optimizing and Finding Alternatives to Wood

by Dan Imhoff

Book Overview

Part green building primer, part architectural photo essay, this is an essential resource for professionals and homeowners interested in the leading edge of environmental building. Imhoff traveled extensively to document and photograph beautiful and novel alternatives to wood intensive-building. Building with Vision is the first book to link residential building with forest impacts. Nearly 1.5 million new houses are built in the United States each...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0970950004
• ISBN13: 9780970950000
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Watershed Media
• Length: 136 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 9.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Oikos Green Source Builing Book Review

This visually dynamic, front-end resource tool allows architects, builders and owners to explore opportunities to use tree-free, recycled and certified wood materials and systems. It's a "concept book" that's useful in the earliest stages of project design, research and planning. After identifying building materials or techniques, use the contacts and resources listed to gather further information on construction specifications and to find suppliers in your area. (Another good source of suppliers is the Oikos Product Directory.) Building with Vision offers concise overviews, at-a-glance advantages and challenges, original photographs, resources for further research, dozens of case studies and sidebars that encourage healthy construction by minimizing forest destruction. It is a must-have resource for architecture studios, contractors, homeowners and others concerned about the ecological impacts of building projects. Building with Vision includes these topics: Construction Without Destruction (Randy Hayes); Building as if Forests Mattered (Sim Van der Ryn); The Case for Local Solutions; FSC-Certified, Recycled and Salvaged Wood; Framing Siding and Sheathing Options; Insulated Structural Systems; Natural Building Methods; Recycled Materials and Resource Recovery; Surface and Finish Materials; extensive resource directories.

EcoIQ Review

Building with Vision: Optimizing and Finding Alternatives to Wood is an easy to read, visually dynamic resource tool that allows architects, builders and owners to explore and envision a variety of opportunities to use tree-free, recycled, and FSC certified wood materials and structural systems before projects begin. Written by Dan Imhoff with photography by Roberto Carra, Building With Vision makes accessible many solutions to wasteful tree-dependent construction and design. In addition to identifying the benefits, challenges, and applications of the recommended alternatives to contemporary American construction, this book details building methods to minimize wood waste, maximize efficiency, and emphasize the unique aesthetic properties of non-wood materials. "Today, as this timely and useful book outlines, we have a multitude of choices available to us in designing and building without destroying forests or polluting the planet," says Sim Van der Ryn, California architect and Director of the Ecological Design Institute. Part resource guide, part photo essay, this 136-page book features beautifully composed, nearly tactile photographs that bring to life an array of alternative materials. Case studies highlight successful building projects utilizing innovative and effective framing, siding, insulation, roofing, and finishing materials and techniques.

Building with Vision - reviewed by Science News

Of the approximately 1.5 million new homes built each year in the United States, 90 percent are framed in wood. Estimates are that for each 2,000-square-foot house, one acre of forest is felled to supply the wood. Building with Vision is the second in a trilogy that outlines ways to reverse this trend. This book focuses on how to design environmentally sound buildings. Details include building techniques and descriptions of materials including Styrofoam, steel, concrete, straw bales, rammed earth, and adobe. For each technique, Imhoff lists numerous information sources. Watershed, 2002, 136 p., color/b & w photos/illus., paperback, $22.00.