By Henry Petroski
An architectural whodunit that unlocks the secrets and techniques of a hand-built home.
while Henry Petroski and his spouse Catherine obtained an enthralling yet modest six-decades-old island retreat in coastal Maine, Petroski couldn’t support yet appreciate its strange development. An eminent specialist on engineering, heritage, and layout, he all started puzzling over concerning the place’s origins and evolution: Who outfitted it, and the way? What wishes, fabrics, applied sciences, old advancements, and legislation formed it? How had it fared over the years with its a variety of population?
Sleuthing round dimly lit closets, knotty-pine wall panels, or even a mystery passage―but by no means removal loads as a nail―Petroski zooms in at the info but additionally steps again to envision the constitution within the context of its time and place.
Catherine Petroski’s attractive photos seize the clues and the ambience. a colourful solid of buddies and earlier residents―most significantly the house’s masterful writer, an engineer-turned-“folk architect”―become key characters within the story.
As the secret unfolds, revealing a rare apartment and its environs, this ode to loving layout will go away readers enchanted and inspired.
eighty images
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Extra resources for The House with Sixteen Handmade Doors: A Tale of Architectural Choice and Craftsmanship
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Most of them seem to know the perils of indecision, and that is why they give us a ring when they think that they are close by but cannot imagine that the road before them will take them to our place. They are reluctant to head toward a barnlike structure with a green tin roof where the road appears to end. When we ask our short-distance callers to describe where they are, they invariably say that they are in front of a very big shingled house into whose driveway our instructions are taking them.
This deconstruction has not been physical, however, because no nail was pulled, no screw unscrewed, no board removed to look into the house’s innards. The nature of its design and the manner of its construction provide ample opportunity to examine the underside of wooden floors, to study the back sides of handmade doors, and to peer into the dark corners of unfinished closets to ferret out much about the man and his house. But as transparent as some of its structure may be, there are also parts of it that are mysterious and seemingly inscrutable.
The staffer said that she had a small house in Cushing, a nearby farming community, and was thinking of putting it on the market. It was just down the road from a property associated with Andrew Wyeth that had once been the residence of Christina Olson, the polio victim depicted in the painting Christina’s World, and that can be seen in its background. Wyeth had a three-decades-long association with that house, sometimes using an upstairs room in it as a studio, which gave the staffer’s little house nearby a certain cachet.