The House with Sixteen Handmade Doors: A Tale of Architectural Choice and Craftsmanship
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1997, Duke University engineering and history professor Petroski (The Pencil) and his wife bought a summer house in coastal Maine. Although it was the riverside location that initially enchanted them, Petroski soon became intrigued by the house itself, which was built by its original owner, Robert Phinney, also an engineer, in the 1950s. This leisurely narrative of a house and its environs and community, with photographs by the author's wife, Catherine, is an architectural detective story that meanders like the river the house overlooks, and which Petroski likens to a game of Clue. He admires impeccable "fits," speculates about empty beam recesses in the basement walls, and slowly peels away the mysteries of an oddly configured closet. But this investigation of a painstakingly crafted, idiosyncratic cabin does not end at its walls; Petroski nests his discoveries in the local historical, geographical, natural, and human events he encounters, chatting with neighbors, making repairs, sitting with Catherine on matching glider chairs, and watching river activity flow by. Petroski's prose, as carefully crafted as Phinney's workmanship, will make satisfying reading for architects and carpenters of the professional, amateur, and armchair varieties, as well as local history buffs and Maine lovers. 80 photos.
