Building expert pens an owner’s manual for your biggest investment
Building expert pens an owner’s manual for your biggest investment
Robert Butler ’62, BArch ’64, has worked as an off-the-grid carpenter in Big Sur, California, an architect in Atlanta, and a pre-sale home inspector in New York’s tony Westchester County. He’s also authored six books on technical topics in architecture and engineering for professionals in those fields and holds two patents on architectural inventions. In the early Seventies, he designed and built the house in which he and his wife have lived ever since.
In his first self-published book, Architecture Laid Bare! In Shades of Green, Butler coalesces insights from throughout his career in a primer on building systems and construction practices for lay readers. Making a departure from the do-it-yourself ethos he embraced early in his career, Butler writes for “literate homeowners” unlikely to remodel their own kitchen, lay their own roofing shingles, or install their own toilet, but in need of the insight that promotes optimal service from building trades professionals. “It’s not intended to be a book that you would read cover to cover, like a novel,” says Butler, who compares the 458-page, robustly indexed tome to an encyclopedia. “The ideal reader might skim and get a real good idea of what it’s about. Then, if you have to hire a plumber, you can read this section and say, ‘This is the way I want it done, like it’s described in these pages.’ ”
Peppered with personal anecdotes, Architecture Laid Bare begins with tips on how to conduct the bidding process that precedes hiring an architect or construction firm and concludes with basic principles of acoustics and their application in the built environment. Along the way, Butler delves into structural engineering, electricity, lighting, plumbing, and climate control. He also holds forth on what’s hot in environmentally friendly design and construction, rendering opinions on everything from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification program—it misses the mark, he concludes—to the charm of reused building materials, a critical analysis of eco-marketing, and the merits of wood-burning fireplaces. “Architecture has lately fallen into the wrong hands: legions of phony promoters, incompetent professionals, and profiteering purveyors who prey on the very occupants they claim to serve,” he writes in the introduction. “And it is time to wrest this science of shelter, this Mother of the Arts, from these exploiters and place it in the hands of those who ask for, pay for, and live in these enclosures: You.”
For more information, go to: architecturelaidbare.com.