This is a translation from Russian by (Julia and Robin Whitby). It is a fantastic and idiosyncratic documentation of Russia's heritage in wooden building. The author's enthusiasm and knowledge for the subject is evident. However there is a self-importance in the tone that can made me laugh. For instance he talks of the restoration (1955) of the great cathedral of the transfiguration, Kizhi on Lake Omega. "The island was without electricity and restorers toiled for 10-16 hours a day and into the night by the light of paraffin lamps. Many designs were decided on the spot; the science of restoration was still in its infancy and the heavy hand of bureaucracy was not yet an obstacle to the work. A team of carpenters headed by the architect and restorer in chief (the author) was the final authority in the case for a dispute." Then just a bit latter on, on the same page this glorious statement is made "The exterior plan of the Kizhi Cathedral is quite simple, being based on a twenty walled polygon."

The pictures are however great, in black and white, and colour as well as some further diagrams and sketches. The overwhelming aspect of these wooden buildings is the huge variety of texture that has been developed by the builders in the log walls, claddings and shingles that make them. In our current culture we seem to go for flat clean lines with all the artistry of a machine painting white lines on a road. In the past it seems the builders/designers of these buildings developed a whole range of texture from the roofs down. For instance shaping the shingles in a variety of ways on the same roof.

The book shows other forms of development and thus points a way to a design ideal that develops the material onto the form rather than producing a form and then thinking how shall we build that. Kizhi Cathedral is perhaps the apogee of wooden building in Russia (1714), however one can not help but wonder what would have happened next if the renaissance had not caught up with them with the building of St Petersburg. How would the buildings have developed?

At the end of the book the author writes, "one commission to the carpenters instructed them to build a church guided by the old ways and your own sense of proportion and beauty". It give pause for thought when echoed by the modern Hungarian Karoly Kos who said that "the roots of our constructive art lie in the middle ages" and the subsequent spawning of the new Hungarian architecture of people like Imre Makovecz and Dezso Ekler.

I was luck to have this copy bought for me, so I have no idea of the price. 7/10

Review by Quercus

This book is about native highland trees. Sorry, but this isn't my kind of book. It hovers between some sort of easy botanic read and vaguely interesting snippets of Celtic folklore. In the main it is a list of quasi-fact and surmise with no cogent bibliography at the end. It is not a scholarly piece in the least, but great for a tourist to dip into on a wet summer afternoon in Argyll.

Throughout the book one senses a certain gloom and despondency about the fate of native trees. To quote "and the future of the juniper is not healthy", "the elder's future is not secure" " the willow should have a future allowed them" etc etc. Anyone reading it might think that the Sahara desert was engulfing the Highlands.

There is a lack of historical perspective in various comments about forest utilisation. The book seems to dig a chasm between the "then" when the highlander lived in harmony with nature and the "now" when we are so cruel, nasty and short sighted. The actual history of timber and land utilisation seems to have passed the author by.

When reading this sort of book I look for a variety in source material and viewpoint. In this there was very little and he seemed to be scared of quoting from other books all together. As a result it is not opinionated enough to move any argument forward or erudite enough to make a contribution as a reference book.

Sorry 2/10

Review by Quercus

This is an historical catalogue of the influence of wood on civilisation from early days with Gilgamesh in Lebanon to the end of the last century North America. It is a good read, but Mr Perlin starts out with a set of premises that he tends to wrap his history around. This attitude of mind is shown in its worst light at the very end of the book in which he refers to the widespread forest clearances in the Eastern USA during 19th Century. He writes "by the time the 1880 census came out, it had become increasingly clear that the forests in the north eastern quadrant of the United States were going to become another chapter in humanity's piecemeal destruction of the planet." Although the book was published in 1991 he omits to mention that the Northeast USA now has a thriving timber industry (exporting to the UK) based on the re-growth of those very forests. He seems to also forget at times that trees do re-grow.

Another example is his attitude to the Roman uses of timber. Although the city of Rome is growing to become one of the biggest on the face of the planet, he seems to be surprised that local timber gets used up. Probably the demand for food would have used up more land than the building or shipping trades. This agricultural land hunger is not mentioned. It would, one fears, interfere with the general premise that civilisation destroys forests through profligate waste. On the Roman side there is evidence of very good forest practice well into the Empire days if only because fuel and timber shortages are not in fact huge issues.

The basic economics of transport are not gone into at all, and importation of timber is seen as an evil. Before trains and lorries water transport was the easiest. Thus Rome will have been importing logs because it was cheaper, than using a horse to haul it from inland. The economics in 15th century Scotland were such that it was cheaper to bring timber from 300 miles away up the Vistula in Poland to Stirling or Edinburgh than to bring it by the cart load from up a highland glen with no river. Ancient Roman economics will have been much the same.

Perlin's book is however a really good read but I worry about some of his conclusions. This tends to cloud his undoubted breadth of study. 6/10 Review by Quercus

This book is a joy from cover to cover. It is more rare that one finds such depth of scholarship and fairness in reporting in a modern book. The book is a catalogue of trees and their utilisation in the ancient Mediterranean world spanning "the world of Greeks, Romans and Phoenicians from the Bronze Age to the fall of the Roman Empire". He apologises for ignoring Spain and France, and claims that a better book could have been written by concentrating on the woodlands of Italy. "But" he says "there were too many relevant problems of Greek history that interested me and I had always been interested by the splendid description of cedars of Lebanon in the Old Testament. Had I followed reason rather than enthusiasm I should never have seen the Lebanon Mountains and so have missed one of my most memorable experiences." Thank goodness he did follow his enthusiasm for his subject for it certainly shows.

So he begins with Gilgamesh and Enkidu's trip to see the cedars (in the epic of Gilamesh)
"From the face of the mountain
The cedars raise aloft their luxuriance
Good is their shade, full of delight."

As Meiggs was a classic scholar and also worked in the timber world, neither side of the book has a noticeable weakness. It has been written in a spirit of enthusiasm for knowledge rather than to prove some spurious point. When devastation does occur he documents it. However his assumptions never range beyond the facts at his disposal. This is especially so when talking about deforestation in Italy and elsewhere.

All in all the breadth of his scholastic endeavours is breathtaking and if one should ever want to know what Cleopatra's liked her tables made from, or what kind of timber was used in the hull of a trireme, this is the place to look. Maybe I have bizarre tastes, but this book has brought me a great deal of pleasure. 9/10

Review by Quercus

I always have a problem with books like these when the photos are so much more expressive than the writing. There is a school of thought that claims that modern architecture only survives through good photography. However there is more in this than good photographs. A large proportion of the buildings presented simply blow away the cobwebs of Western European concrete that seem to surround our current architectural thoughts, developing some delightful ideas in very diverse materials. Of course being into wood I loved Bart Prince's Price House (Corona Del Mar, California 1984) which does things with shingles that shouldn't be possible. Indeed it is this exploration of texture that I find so appealing. If Bart Prince is all sinewy line and curve then Robert Overstreet in Overstreet House (Carte Madera, California) offers a different textural experience in timber using straightforward plank and huge over sized round pillars. He produces sophisticated interiors while still leaving the corrugation of the saw marks on his planking. The result is anything but rustic.

Of course there are buildings not to my taste. The ultra neo-gothic Tabancay House (Oakland California) by Ace Architects is one. But maybe again I just didn't get the joke. There is also a rather silly tendency to rely on steel junctions for timber frames and in these houses this can not be for cost saving reasons. The junctions are often plain and unsightly and rarely do they live up to the decor of the rest of the building. The Price House is one example in which the junctions are worked into the design in an effective manner.

All this as the cover says is a great source of ideas not least interiors. What did come across is that the architects/designers seem to be having fun. Even the guys who were given huge wads of cash to design themselves a glorified barn/ cow shed to live and work in (I kid you not) (Jonathan Livingston (architect) with Roger Fleck- Fleck House, Nicasio, California).

This book is very much worth more than a flick through. The photography is great. This is architecture, as you have never seen it before. With a price tag of 55 US dollars, it isn't cheap but it is much more than a coffee-table-book. Try amazon.com or similar. 8/10

Review by Quercus