Themed Book Lists

15 Books about Beaches, Rivers, Water, and Design

Cape Cod architecture, The Sea Ranch, forms from the ocean, surfboards and swimming pools

June 25, 2014

From modern houses on Cape Cod to landscaping for coastal areas to the design of surfboards, here are 15 design-related books on beaches and other bodies of water to usher in summer.

1
Art Forms from the Ocean Olaf Breidbach

From the Publisher. At the nexus of art and science, this dazzling new edition of Ernst Haeckel's first work reintroduces the genius of an enigmatic scientist and passionate observer of the natural world. Although original editions of this book are extremely rare, it is now available for the first time in a paperback edition, beautifully reproducing his drawings and watercolors. While the variety and detail of Haeckel's drawings display an impressive understanding of biological structure, the skill with which Haeckel drew these tiny, aquatic protozoa renders them genuine works of art. This volume features commentary and descriptions of each of the radiolarians from Haeckel's work.

2
At Home by the Sea Brian Vanden Brink
Bruce Snider

From the Publisher. Acclaimed architectural photographer Brian Vanden Brink joins forces with Custom Home magazine editor Bruce Snider to take readers into 21 stunning seaside homes from Canada's Bay of Fundy to St. Barthelemy. While Snider writes about homes that range from traditional to ultra-modern, Vanden Brink's photos show that these homes are intimately linked to their seascape settings. This book provides inspiration for anyone who wants to evoke a sense of the sea and shore at home.

3
Beach Houses: Andrew Geller Alastair Gordon

From the Publisher. The Bra. The Box Kite. The Cat. The Milk Carton. The Reclining Picasso. These are the playful names given to the eccentric beach houses of Andrew Geller. Built in the 1950s and 1960s, these whimsical vacation homes reflected the idea of summer leisure for a generation more concerned with fun on the beach than ostentatious display. For clients in the Hamptons, on the Jersey shore, and in New England, Geller built dozens of houses, most of wood and most on modest budgets. Geller, who worked with Raymond Loewy and directed the design of such modernist landmarks as the Lever House in New York, combined a modern interest in light, breeze, and functional living with playful form-making. These spirited houses, many shown here for the first time through vintage photographs and drawings, still delight today and will inspire anyone interested in beach house living.

4
Building with Water: Concepts, Typology, Design Zoë Ryan

A discussion of sustainable design through the union of water and architecture, Building with Water presents numerous international designs, classified by their proximity to lakes, rivers, and seas, such as the Château de Chenonceaux on the Loire, Falling Water in Pennsylvania by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California by Louis I. Kahn.

5
Cape Cod Modern Peter McMahon
Christine Cipriani
Photographs by Raimund Koch
Foreword by Kenneth Frampton

From the Publisher. In the summer of 1937, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and a professor at Harvard's new Graduate School of Design, rented a house on Planting Island, near the base of Cape Cod. There, he and his wife, Ise, hosted a festive reunion of Bauhaus masters and students who had recently emigrated from Europe: Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, Xanti Schawinsky and others. Together they feasted, swam and planned their futures on a new continent, all sensing they were on the cusp of a momentous new phase in their lives. Yet even as they moved on, the group never lost its connection to the Cape Cod coast. Several members returned, when they had the means, to travel farther up the peninsula, rent cabins, buy land and design their ideal summer homes. Thus began a chapter in the history of modern architecture that has never been told--until now. The flow of talent onto the Outer Cape continued and, within a few years, the area was a hotbed of intellectual currents from New York, Boston, Cambridge and the country's top schools of architecture and design. Avant-garde homes began to appear in the woods and on the dunes; by the 1970s, there were about 100 modern houses of interest here. In this story, we meet, among others, the Boston Brahmins Jack Phillips and Nathaniel Saltonstall; the self-taught architect, carpenter and painter Jack Hall; the Finn Olav Hammarström, who had worked for Alvar Aalto; and the prolific Charlie Zehnder, who brought the lessons of both Frank Lloyd Wright and Brutalism to the Cape. Initially, these designers had no clients; they built for themselves and their families, or for friends sympathetic to their ideals. Their homes were laboratories, places to work through ideas without spending much money. The result of this ferment is a body of work unlike any other, a regional modernism fusing the building traditions of Cape Cod fishing towns with Bauhaus concepts and postwar experimentation.

6
Coastal Garden Plants Roy L. Heizer
Photography by Nancy Heizer

From the Publisher. Discover and enjoy the flowers, shrubs, and trees of America’s northern coastal region. Stroll through Portland, Boston Common, New York City, Philadelphia, and the Baltimore Harbor, and delight in getting to know the natural beauty that makes your excursion a gardener’s paradise. In this informative guide, over 400 vibrant color photographs taken in natural settings allow readers to see the flora as it was meant to be seen, in the garden. While this book contains historical, mythological, and original tales about the garden plants of the northern coastal region, with a handy cross reference names index, it may also be used as a quick reference guide. As captured here, whether a visitor to one of the East Coast’s many botanical gardens, a home landscaper or a native plant enthusiast, there is an abundance of wonder along the coast for every nature lover! Gardeners from Augusta, Maine, to Dover, Delaware, will find this book enlightening and enjoyable.

7
Designers Abroad: Inside the Vacation Homes of Top Decorators Michele Keith

From the Publisher. Designers Abroad takes the reader on a tour of the world, from Sri Lanka to South Africa to Sweden, by peeking into the gorgeously appointed homes of renowned interior designers. In lively and dynamic text, Michele Keith explores how they incorporate the distinct and native character a foreign land into their second homes, all the while expressing personal style. Embracing new cultures’ climates, architectural traditions, and indigenous art, fabrics, and furniture, each designer creates a space at once comfortable and glamorous, a place of solace and inspiration.

Designers Abroad offers inside peeks into residences ranging from a chic studio in Paris to a house perched on windswept cliffs in Nova Scotia, from a beachside abode nestled among boulders in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, to a former monastery outside Rome dating back to the fifteenth century. Each project is accompanied by the story of how its design was conceived and executed, and how the attributes of each country inspired its owners—including Lars Bolander, Alessandra Branca, Clodagh, Timothy Corrigan, Mica Ertegun, Fisher Weisman, Juan Pablo Molyneux, Juan Montoya, and Cortney and Robert Novogratz, among others. Designers Abroad demonstrates how these designers incorporate their passion for travel into their own interiors, and thus inspires readers to add a touch of the exotic to their own homes.

8
Distant Shores Chris Burkard
Steve Crist

From the Publisher. Chris Burkard’s photographs are punctuated by energized landscapes and moments of bliss, by adventure seeking and the lifestyle that it encompasses, and by movement and intuitive light-working capabilities. With the ocean as his main muse, Burkard has consistently captured his subject in timeless and expansive photographic impressions, utilizing the tool of surfing to approach the ocean’s intricate personality and then extending out to include the human personalities that draw meaning from this same source. Searching for wild, remote destinations and offbeat landscapes, Burkard portrays the humble placement of the human in contrast to nature. At just 26 years of age, Burkard has spent the last eight years seeking out remote surf in the most rugged conditions in the world. In the process, he has established himself as a major photographer in the surf and outdoor community. Burkard serves as senior staff photographer for Surfer magazine and contributes regularly to various international publications and companies such as Patagonia. Burkard has completed two book projects, one with friend and co-author Eric Soderquist, titled The California Surf Project (2006), and the other, Plight of the Torpedo People, accompanying Patagonia body surfing film, Come Hell or High Water (2012).

9
Fire Island Modernist Christopher Bascom Rawlins

From the Publisher. As the 1960s became The Sixties, architect Horace Gifford executed a remarkable series of beach houses that transformed the terrain and culture of New York's Fire Island. Growing up on the beaches of Florida, Gifford forged a deep connection with coastal landscapes. Pairing this sensitivity with jazzy improvisations on modernist themes, he perfected a sustainable modernism in cedar and glass that was as attuned to natural landscapes as to our animal natures. Gifford's serene 1960s pavilions provided refuge from a hostile world, while his exuberant post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS masterpieces orchestrated bacchanals of liberation. Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift once spurned Hollywood limos for the rustic charm of Fire Island's boardwalks. Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's here. Diane von Furstenburg showed off her latest wrap dresses to an audience that included Halston, Giorgio Sant' Angelo, Calvin Klein and Geoffrey Beene. Today, such a roster evokes the aloof, gated compounds of the Hamptons or Malibu. But these celebrities lived in modestly scaled homes alongside middle-class vacationers, all with equal access to Fire Island's natural beauty. Blending cultural and architectural history, Fire Island Modernist ponders a fascinating era through an overlooked architect whose life, work and colorful milieu trace the operatic arc of a lost generation, and still resonate with artistic and historical import.

10
Ganges Water Machine Anthony Acciavatti

From Publisher. Beyond the dense urbanism of Mumbai (Bombay) or the IT centers of Bangalore and Hyderabad lies the Ganges River basin—today home to over one-quarter of India’s billion-plus population—a space historically defined by a mythological constellation of terrestrial sites imbued with celestial significance. Not only is it one of the most densely populated river basins in the world, but it also undergoes dramatic physical changes with the onslaught of the wet monsoon, where over one-meter of rainfall occurs in the span of three months.

This book focuses on the intersection of these two observations. It is an atlas of built and unbuilt projects designed to transform the river into a giant water machine.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, this mythical watercourse has functioned as a laboratory to test and build a new civilization around the culture of water. Jointly authored by people and nature, the Ganges River is today a monstrous water machine in which the entire basin became a workshop of human-made experience, defined by a hydrological system best described as a supersurface: a surface engineered from the scale of the soil to the scale of the nation. Everything from diffuse urban projects and green revolutions to colossal public works programs and architectural transformations constitute the genesis of the Ganges Water Machine. Whether to thwart massive peasant uprisings or to redirect monsoonal rains to productive ends, never before has a river that inspired the realization of unbelievable architectural and infrastructural projects received as little scrutiny as the Ganges river basin.

Reaching through the very heart of some of India’s most densely populated cities, small towns, industrial zones, sacred sites, and mountainous forests, Ganges Water Machine by Anthony Acciavatti, composed of eight years of field and archival research, explores and theorizes the people and infrastructures that made the Ganges Water Machine a reality.

This is an atlas of the enterprise to make the Ganges River basin into a water machine: it reveals the narratives and explanations that allowed engineers and planners to realize fantasies previously only imaginable on paper or in myth.

11
The Houses of the Hamptons Paul Goldberger

Published in 1986, as the stylistic tide was turning away from modernism, the book refers to the Hamptons as an “architectural stage,” and documents the early work of architects such as Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, Julian and Barbara Neski, Norman Jaffe, and Alfredo de Vido, which made the Hamptons one of the key regions in the United States for significant postwar modernist residential architecture.

12
Newport Villas Michael C. Kathrens

From the Publisher. A survey of the Gilded Age mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, Newport Villas describes the architectural and social development of this summer resort town, the nexus of wealth and fashion at the end of the 19th century. All the accoutrements were the best that money could buy, whether it was Parisian frocks, meticulously groomed thoroughbred horses, or meals prepared by imported French chefs. To properly mount their entertainments, Newport's elite built "cottages" that ranged in size from 30 to 70 rooms. The country’s most accomplished architects designed these seaside villas, many of them rivaling the great houses of Europe. Pictured here in abundant archival and new photographs, with accompanying floor plans, the houses cover the gamut of revival styles from Colonial Revival to Italian Renaissance Revival, from French Classical Revival to Georgian Revival.

13
POOLS: Aquatic Architecture Hughes Condon Marler Architects

From the Publisher. Having completed more than twelve public Aquatics Centers across Canada in the past decade, Hughes Condon Marler Architects has developed significant architectural expertise in the design of pools without having ever defaulted to a repetitive aesthetic. POOLS traces the evolution of those ideas beginning at Eileen Dailly Leisure Pool all the way through to current projects being developed in Surrey, BC. Through orthographic drawings, diagrams, professional photography and editorial text the strategies employed in each project are clearly illustrated.

Editorial direction by Trevor Boddy examines seven completed Aquatics Centers and delves into the design process of one building that is currently under development in order to bring to light the origin and evolution of ideas that have become HCMA’s architectural ethos.

14
The Sea Ranch, Revised Edition Donlyn Lyndon
Jim Alinder

From the Publisher. A hundred miles north of San Francisco, the Sonoma County coast meets the Pacific Ocean in a magnificent display of nature. This is the location of The Sea Ranch, an area covering several thousand acres of large, open meadows and forested natural settings interspersed with award-winning architecture. The ecologically inspired plan drawn up for The Sea Ranch in the mid-1960s caused a quiet revolution in architecture. Renowned landscape designer Lawrence Halprin's master plan incorporated a set of building guidelines that structured the visual as well as physical impact upon the landscape. Subsequent buildings by architects such as Joseph Esherick, Charles Willard Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, and William Turnbull have been recognized worldwide for their remarkable environmental sensitivity. This revised and updated edition of the now-classic monograph, the only one on the Sea Ranch, contains eleven additional projects and an updated account of the ongoing development process and land management issues.

15
Surf Craft Richard Kenvin

From the Publisher. In his text, Richard Kenvin looks at the craft and design of surfboards from a historical and cultural perspective. He views board design as an exemplary model of mingei, or art of the people, and the craft philosophy of Soetsu Yanagi. Yanagi believed that a design’s true beauty and purpose are revealed when it is put to its intended use. In its purest form, the craft of board building, along with the act of surfing itself, exemplifies mingei. Surf Craft pays particular attention to Bob Simmons’s boards, which are striking examples of this kind of functional design, mirroring the work of postwar modern California designers.

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