A landmark of architectural history, AMERICAN HOMES surveys over 100 American housing styles and illustrates them through nearly 1000 line drawings. Using his own unique combination of "exploded" diagrams and floor plans and easy-to-follow text, award-winning architect and author Lester Walker has created the definitive bible of home design, fully practical but wonderful, too, for armchair browsing and dreaming. Walker describes each style's signature features, and how, where, when and why the style developed in response to the landscape. The full evolution of American residential architecture is represented, including Dutch Colonials, Log cabins, Southern plantation mansions, Carpenter Gothics, Neo-modern styles-and more. For anyone who has ever designed or owned a home-or just lived in one-AMERICAN HOMES is the quintessential reference to our country's dwellings, past, present and future. "The drawings of these houses are splendid...a rich illustrative record of American house architecture." -The Boston Globe