Exterior Building Enclosures: Design Process and Composition for Innovative Facades 1st Edition

This book is not your typical generic architectural book geared towards the broad audience. Boswell shares a deep understanding of strategies, considerations and approaches to highly advanced exterior enclosures. The sections on approach share very relevant and specific calculations and explanations on exterior envelope solutions. The projects included are best-in-class and show benchmarks for advancing the conversation about building skins.This books should be in the library of any serious architect attempting to do innovative buildings.

"Exterior Building Enclosures" focuses on an architectural specialty of increasing importance with the advancement of technology and the imperative to achieve energy efficiency and sustainability. As with the other Wiley architectural reference books, the author is an expert in the field, the technical director at SOM's offices in San Francisco.A strength of this text is the focus on concepts and the design and construction processes before moving into the more specific and technical aspects. There are chapters on brick and stone masonry, concrete, metal framing, and all-glass enclosures. The examples are also very well-chosen and there is a plethora of technical drawings and photographs.The print edition has illustrations and photographs mostly in black and white so I would recommend the Kindle edition. This will also allow the drawings to be enlarged and for searching the text, although the index is well-done.

The dwgs are blurry and didn't serve the purposed of the book even with the kindly / iBook version. It seems that author didn't get the intellectual right to publish the dwgs. Can't be use as a technical guide. Detail Magazine family is far away better.

This book is basically a reference book for architects, although even non-architects could find it useful. It is pretty typical of this type of book - it covers the basic elements to a point and also provides a bit more detail for some select topics.Over the years, I've bought a number of similar books like this one. I'm a draftsman and over the years I have worked at a number of firms in several different engineering disciplines. Books like this one are great for getting up to speed on a discipline new to you and for keeping on hand for when something new to you comes up. One of the things I really liked about this book is that the Author provides overviews for sixteen real-world projects as examples. I don't know about most people, but I feel that I get more out of real-world applications than I do made-up text-book examples.Some issues that I had with the book.Number One, is the lack of a glossary. I was really surprised that the author did not include a glossary. For a reference book such as this, that is a noticeable omission.Number Two, the poor image quality of some of the architectural details. I know there will be some image degradation from shrinking down details meant for large scale architectural drawings to fit on a 7"x9.5" page in a book, but some of the image compression is worse than others in the book. To the point they are useless.Number Three, BIM (Building Information Modeling) is barely covered - at most it is mentioned in a single paragraph about design process and expectations. For a book that focuses on the interrelations of different engineering disciplines, I would think there would be at least a chapter dedicated to BIM.Number Four, which is really an offshoot of number three. All of the information / project examples in the book is from the Author's experience at the one architectural firm (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill). That's good in some ways (you get the perspective of how a successful firm does things), and bad in other ways (probably the reason BIM is not mentioned is that maybe SOM hasn't yet tried to implement it).One thing I will give the publisher props for, is the index. Too many times I've seen books like this one where the index did not match the book, where a book was heavily revised during the editing process and then was published with an index from a previous version. I did a number of spot checks with this book's index and found it correct every time.Review for - Exterior Building Enclosures: Design Process and Composition for Innovative Facades, by C. Keith Baswell

This is an excellent book, which approaches the planning, design, materials and methods of implementation for building facades. This text begins with fundamental principles and project participants, and moves on through in-depth coverage of various styles divided into chapters by the major class of materials that will be utilized.The writing is straightforward, and comprehensive, while an extensive collection of illustrations that clearly put the subject matter into perspective.This is a wonderfully assembled, relevant text to compliment an architectural reference library. It is a real “meat and potatoes” compendium of useful information, which lies at the core of construction innovation.

One hesitates to add new books to one's collection. They are an investment and many seem to repeat the same material. So, the looming question here is: Is Exterior Building Enclosures worth the price? Does it provide new information/ideas? Here are some thoughts:Pros:-Logical organization. Chapters are arranged according to building material (brick masonry, stone masonry, metal framing and glass, etc.)Potential Cons:-As with many books from this publisher, the black and white photos are fuzzy and difficult to appreciate. This is potentially problematic with a text that relies on such visuals. Likewise, the color plates are very few and less-than-inspiring.-Complete lack of headings. It was impossible to find new chapters without glancing back at the table of contents. Pity.-Strangely informal wording. In a section on unwanted joints, the author provides an explanation of why this occurs and then states, "The big idea is to have joints where the design requires them ..." (327). "The big idea"? Hmmm. Maybe "The larger point ... "? Or "The point distilled ..."?If you are a student considering adding this to your collection, I would page through it in-person. If you are a professor considering using this for class, I would first request an exam copy ... I am not convinced I found anything innovative here.