Reviews for The Forgotten Art Of Building And Using A Brick Bake Oven

The average rating for The Forgotten Art Of Building And Using A Brick Bake Oven based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-04-12 00:00:00 Paul Rhoades This was a great read for me. I learned a lot about why I prefer old-style neighboroods to the suburban sprawl. The authors put words on the unconscious thoughts that I usually have as a I walk around the city. The book is easy to read and funny at times. Emphasizing how sprawl kills our sense of community and how good town planning can create that sense of community and give its citizens a place to care about. Here is a random list of things that will improve the sense of place. The book covers each one in more details: - A neighborhood should be roughly a 5-minute walk from edge to center. - Hilltops should be celebrated with civic buildings. - The town center should provide mixed-use buildings. - Lots should be zoned not by use but by building type. No zoning for office parks VS residential VS shopping centers. - Schools and other community centers should always be accessible on foot. - Shops in the town center should not have any setbacks. - Residential streets should be narrow to calm traffic and make it easy to walk across. - Curb radiuses should be kept to a minimum and emergency vehicles should be of appropriate size. - Alleys are useful to hide uglier utilities. - Parking garages should always go in the back of buildings and residential houses.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-04-18 00:00:00 Brian Roland This is interesting as a snapshot of New Urbanism at the tail end of the twentieth century, but parts have not aged well. I enjoyed the first half, which diagnosed the problems of sprawl, more than the last half, which offers solutions that often come across as more dogmatic than evidence-supported. The authors are clearly very proud of their planned communities, which they refer to frequently as case studies, but seventeen years after publication it's less clear that those artificial neighborhoods achieved all they strove for. And while they speak frequently of the importance of urban infill and rehabilitation, the meteoric rise of inner city housing values seems to have outpaced their wildest dreams, leaving much of what they have to say about the truly urban environment feeling dated.