Mobile: The Art of Portable Architecture Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)A little anemic, but some solid ideas are represented here. I would have liked a little coherency in the presentation, and a lot more depth.

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The allure of mobile, portable architecture is worldwide and centuries old, from the desert tents of the bedouin to the silvery capsules of the Airstream trailer. Mobile explores the ever-growing range of possibilities of portable, demountable, and mobile structures. Jennifer Siegal brings together the work of the most interesting contemporary designers of dynamic, active structures, whose work ranges from the microenvironment of a house that literally attaches to your body to the city-scaled macroenvironment of London's Millennium Dome, from the interior of a Boeing jet to an entire mobile community whose living units plug into a framework of flexible communal space, and from the practical design of transportable office space to the whimsical design of Pink Floyd's The Wall stage set. All of the designs celebrate the lightness, transience, and practicality that mobile architecture makes possible.Mobile includes work by Office of Mobile Design, LOT/EK, Vito Acconci, Doug Jackson/LARGE, Mark Fisher, Michael Fox, FTL Happold, Festo, and Lawrence Scarpa. In beautiful color images, detailed drawings, and thoughtful text, the contributors reveal their working methods.

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Freight Train Cars (Enthusiast Color Series) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Like many others, as a child I was fascinated by trains, an interest I recently discovered. Unlike many other railroad enthusiasts, my interest was not primarily on the locomotives, nor the cabooses at the end. It was the freight cars that fascinated me, in their variety of types and colors.
This book gives a very good overview of railroad freight cars. There is discussion about the earliest freight cars of any type, as well as the history and usage of the various types and some insight in to modern freight trains. It has many interesting notes about the design and construction of these cars, in the past and the present, but stops short of getting mired in a lot of details that are likely to bore many readers.
The outstanding photographs are what really make this book, including some of the details revealed in the captions. I wish there were more of them - a lot more - and was tempted to give it a rating of one less star for that reason, but for the price of this book vs. the quality of the printing and binding, such a complaint is not really justified. If trains interest you at all, buy this book!

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