Teach Yourself to Build

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Architecture

Teach Yourself to Build Details

Remember grade-school workbooks where you completed the problems and exercises right on the page? Teach Yourself to Build is a more sophisticated sort of workbook that quickly and directly involves the student or do-it-yourselfer in designing the architectural forms of simple buildings in various materials. It allows readers simultaneously to select appropriate structural systems, lay out structural plans, choose finish materials, develop construction details, and in general to perform many of the major design tasks necessary to make the building a reality. Beginning with a simple lesson on drawing freehand to scale, Teach Yourself to Build presents some basic criteria for deciding on a structural system, outlines a simple procedure for laying out framing, gives worked examples of stair, dimensional, and board footage calculations, and teaches the rationale of concrete framing systems, steel connections, and masonry spanning devices. With the help of these instructions, the student is soon designing a steel-frame office tower, a wood-frame retail establishment, an all-brick house, a classroom building of reinforced concrete, and a large museum of fire-resistant construction. Teach Yourself to Build contains exercises in all the major systems of construction—wood, masonry, steel, and concrete. These cover dozens of skills which are indispensible to the designer, from choosing a structural system to working with major building code provisions. Naturally, this workbook should be accompanied in its use by standard reference books on construction; however, it gives information on many topics which are not covered elsewhere in print. Entirely handwritten and illustrated by the authors, the exercises in Teach Yourself to Build have been used and tested in classrooms and studios at MIT. The student edition of the book is perforated and punched so that pages can be removed for grading and reassembled in a standard three-ring binder, while the other edition has a regular paperback binding suitable for reference and self-instruction.

Reviews

I was very excited about this when I saw it. I'm trying to learn basic residential construction from a hobbyist standpoint, like to build a shed or do renovations on my house one day. This is a really neat idea, it's an old book (1979) and it gives you some basic principles and then exercises to practice what you've learned. Which is an AWESOME IDEA and I'd love if it were longer, more detailed. But, a major drawback is that you don't have solutions to the exercises, so you don't know if you did it right. So that reduces the value significantly, for me. And some of the exercises ask you to do things that you haven't been adequately prepared for in the previous material, which is also annoying and makes it feel incomplete, like these exercises are just for fun and you're not really learning the whole picture (of course you're not, but I was hoping to learn more than this half-information). However, I've already learned some interesting things in the first 12 pages, so I like it.

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