The House with Sixteen Handmade Doors: A Tale of Architectural Choice and Craftsmanship - Hardcover

Petroski, Henry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393242048 ISBN 13: 9780393242041

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

Synopsis

An architectural whodunit that unlocks the secrets of a hand-built home.

When Henry Petroski and his wife Catherine bought a charming but modest six-decades-old island retreat in coastal Maine, Petroski couldn’t help but admire its unusual construction. An eminent expert on engineering, history, and design, he began wondering about the place’s origins and evolution: Who built it, and how? What needs, materials, technologies, historical developments, and laws shaped it? How had it fared through the years with its various inhabitants?

Sleuthing around dimly lit closets, knotty-pine wall panels, and even a secret passage―but never removing so much as a nail―Petroski zooms in on the details but also steps back to examine the structure in the context of its time and place.

Catherine Petroski’s beautiful photographs capture the clues and the atmosphere. A vibrant cast of neighbors and past residents―most notably the house’s masterful creator, an engineer-turned-“folk architect”―become key characters in the story.

As the mystery unfolds, revealing an extraordinary house and its environs, this ode to loving design will leave readers enchanted and inspired.

80 photographs

About this title

About the Authors

Henry Petroski (1942―2023) was the Aleksandar S. Vesic Distinguished Professor Emeritus and professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University. He was the author of many books on engineering and design, including the classics To Engineer Is Human and The Pencil.

Catherine Petroski is a photographer and the author of fiction and nonfiction books, including A Bride’s Passage. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, and Arrowsic, Maine.

Reviews

Since penning his first book on design failures in 1985, prolific author and civil engineer Petroski has also written at length about design successes, including such previously unheralded implements as paper clips, pencils, and toothpicks. In his latest work, Petroski picks a much more personal topic on which to focus his manufacturing expertise, his own second home on a riverbank in coastal Maine. When Petroski and his wife, Catherine, bought the cabin-like retreat several years ago, he had little idea it would be filled with enough design quirks to provoke him into a full-scale investigation of its construction history. Along with knotty pine walls and oddly built closets, the house features its own secret passage. Petroski’s research included surveying the building’s unusual environs and interviewing former owners and surviving relatives of its eccentric builder. Though this fascinating history of a house includes painstaking attention to woodcrafting techniques that may excite professional and amateur ­architects and ­carpenters a bit more than general readers, the book is replete with Petroski’s usual fascinating details and elegant prose. --Carl Hays

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393242048
• ISBN 13: 9780393242041
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304