Robert Brown Butler

These references enable architects, designers, engineers, and contractors to select and size virtually every functional component (beams, columns, pipes, wires, ducts, etc.) that exists in almost any building from shed to skyscraper anywhere in the world. They include chapters on design, structure, climate control, plumbing, electricity, illumination, and acoustics; and the text for each component describes the essential criteria for its design, gives the formulas, and explains each unknown. Each thick volume bulges with hundreds of informative ink drawings, tables, graphs, and schedules; and volumes 2, 3, and 4 include computerized disks that enable a user to solve each equation with lightning speed. With this instant consultant in hand, you'll no longer need to perform tedious calculations, refer to shelves of other texts, or relearn subjects forgotten long ago —and you'll do a day's work in an hour.

This volume's method of selecting and sizing virtually every functional component in a building promotes all that is beautiful in architecture. For the truest beauty results from doing what is supremely appropriate and the subtraction of all else. Take the caryatids of the Erechtheum in Athens, perhaps the loveliest columns ever devised: Only when each slender feminine waist was given the slimmest section that would support the mass above could these graceful forms transcend the bland loyalty of posts to become a beauty so supreme that they hardly seem like structural supports at all. Such functional modeling is all a building needs to be beautiful.

Finally, this volume emphasizes environmentally appropriate architecture whenever possible. There is a vital reason for this: the wilderness ratio, which states the following. Every urban square mile requires about fifty square miles of wilderness to purify its air, recycle its water, absorb its wastes, modify its climate, and provide a substantial portion of its food and fiber needs without economic cost or human management. This ratio indicates that we all must preserve nature as much as possible —not so our children may enjoy its majesty someday, but simply so they may breathe.