Interior Design Books

House Comfortable is a very complete resource for creating a comfortable home. I recommend it for first time decorators and those who are designing a custom-built home. It covers a variety of topics including lighting, color, furniture placement, room measurements, etc. But, it goes beyond listing the design elements of a comfortable home and actually tells you how to achieve this goal. This book includes a resource section and loads of wonderful, practical advice; detail you would tend to omitin a do-it-yourself project. It reads like a stylish text book that you will want to take with you on shopping trips.

Written by professional architect Matthew Schoenherr with assistance from Linda Mason Hunter and Wendy Jordan, Housetransformed: Getting The Home You Want...With The House You Have is a no-nonsense guide to the seven keys successful remodeling, whether one is redoing a room, building an addition, or making over the entire house. Filled with color photographs and floor plans of 19 beautifully remodeled houses, House Transformed offers pros and cons for the design issues that every homeowner faces. An excellent resource for inspiration and innovation when making tough decisions on how to transform one's home.

If you like to see more pictures then text, then this book is a great buy. The fotos presented in this book are excellent and put your imagination to work. This book is a great learning device, especially if you pay attention to the details and to the design presented.

This is an excellent book! It covers every aspect of the options available, the latest in innovative designs & techniques, & a whole lot more. It gives you hints on the best time of the year to buy, how to choose economical appliances, how to be earth-friendly, it's all here. It a textbook, but is very easy to read for anyone.

The authors and contributors to this book worked deep in the fine details of Houston's past. So much of it has been lost to the ages, but with Houston's Forgotten Heritage, it almost comes back to life through the fine photographs of the opulent homes and even the log cabins. It is a joy to show this book to many of my "old-timer" neighbors, who remember a building here and there, and even the old fixtures, appliances, and ways of life. We should all be grateful to the authors of this book for reminding us of our glorious past.

Pyysiäinen applies the philosophies and theories of thinkers that include Émile Durkhiem, Mircea Eliade, Jerry Fodor, Clifford Geertz and Robert McCauley in this analysis of the cognitive basis of religion. Central themes include religion and culture, religion and society, ritual and emotion, and ethics.

Arguing, perhaps controversially, that mechanisms underlying religious thought and behavior are something that can be naturally explained in the same manner as any other cultural and cognitive phenomena, the author examines how cognitive science can shed light on religious phenomena. After defining the ideas and behaviors to be studied, he argues that cognitive theories of the representation of agency and counter- intuitiveness can make sense of the widespread belief in supernatural beings. The theories of religion of Geertz and Durkheim are examined and criticized as arbitrary abstractions. In the end, Pyysiäinen argues that religion should be understood both as a distinct cognitive phenomena and as being related to other phenomena of counter-intuitiveness revealed in empirical studies.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Ch. 1 Introduction: Cognitive Approach to Religion 1
The Category of 'Religion' 1
The Cognitive Approach 5
Ch. 2 God and Transcendence 9
'God' as an Emic Concept 9
Superhuman Beings, Religion and Science 12
Intentional Agents 14
Counter-Intuitiveness of Gods 18
Ch. 3 Religion and Culture 25
Geertz and the Concept of 'Culture' 25
Geertz and Symbolism 33
Geertz on Religion as a Symbolic Cultural System 44
Ch. 4 Religion and the Social 55
On the Sociological Background of Durkheim's Theory of Religion 55
Religion and Society 59
Religion as Symbolic of the Society - A Critique 63
Religion and Society Reconsidered 70
Ch. 5 Religious Belief, Experience, and Ritual 77
Ritual and Emotion 78
What is Emotion? 97
On the Neurophysiology of Emotion 102
Religious Experience, "Mysticism" and Emotions 109
Ch. 6 Religion, "Worldview," and Ethics 143
Religion as "Worldview" 143
An Outline of Ethics as a Field of Study 158
Religious Ethics 173
Ch. 7 Religion and Cognition: Towards a New Science of Religion 197
Domain Specificity 197
Cognitive Modules 199
Intuitive Theories and Cognitive Domains 208
Is Religion a Cognitive Domain? 215
References 237
Index of Names 267
Index of Subjects 270

Want to see the original drawings for the Red-Blue Chair? Or find a little-known fact about one of designs of Gerrit Rietveld that normally would require examination of an original or a long conversation with someone from Christies? And then, maybe, actually build the piece yourself? This is the book to get. It's not enclyclopedic, though, so make sure that what you are interested in is present in the 50-or-so works here. Also has some terrific old photographs of the workshop, original installations, lines, and advertising.

Barbara Crisp eloquently represents through her words and the beautiful photographs the importance of the spaces we live in. I am not in the design profession, however, found this a wonderful book for anyone interested in the connection of our living, working and healing environments. A beautiful coffee table book.

Inglehart is undoubtedly THE go-to expert on social value changes and shifts in industrial society. Through his work with the World Values Survey, he has made significant contributions to social science. This book is a great introduction to his body of work and summarizes nicely the patterns human behaviors have formed over the decades. Building on his earlier work, Inglehart finds significant shifts away from survivalism towards social postmodernism in industrial societies of the post-WWII era. He shows the links between such postmodernism and social movements in a characteristically scientific way throughout the book. It's a bit heady and not exactly a "fun" read, but quite accurate, and worth careful consideration. I would recommend this to anyone doing research in the social science field, advanced undergraduates, or even a layperson looking to gain greater understanding of the human family's behavior over the last decades. If you're wondering why we have the society that we do, this is the right resource with which to explore such a question. Once you read this, you'll also want to pick up Modernization and Postmodernization, Inglehart's 1997 book that is a bit more in-depth. As a political science graduate student researching social movements, Inglehart's work has been invaluable to just about every lit review I've written. If you're only looking at this because it's on a requirement list for a class, thank your teacher for making you read this.

This is such an entertaining read as well as a look at a wide variety of decorating styles. I first became interested in this decorator (the only one I know by name) in Architectural Digest. These wonderful projects kept coming up in different months and so I started reading the articles that went with the pictures in the projects and discovered Bill Stubbs! He has a fresh eye for every client. He really looks and really listens. How unusual in today's self absorbed world.