Here's an excerpt from the publisher's notes on Xtreme Houses (I'll review it myself after I get a copy; I'm plugging it now because Courtenay's a friend of mine and I've been following the progress of the book pre-publication):

“The house has become to contemporary architects what the seven-inch single was to Punk bands,” declare Courtenay Smith and Sean Topham. “It is a liberating challenge for its designer and an immediate, accessible product for the end user.” Xtreme Houses examines forty-five newly designed and built dwelling spaces by architects, artists, collectives and individuals from around the globe. Responding to the changing desires of consumers and the inevitable influences of overpopulation, suburban sprawl, environmental concerns, technological advances and economic fluctuation, each of the selected projects offers radical and unique solutions to our basic human need for shelter.

Xtreme Houses considers four general approaches to residential dwellings. The first chapter entitled “Self-Construct” covers a variety of do-it-yourself strategies. From private individuals who consider custom building a luxury to impoverished self-builders for whom it is the only means to obtain shelter, taking matters into one’s own hands and starting from scratch has resulted in exceptional and innovative housing solutions. Three pioneering examples are Michael Hoenes’ Tin-Can Houses in Africa, Brooklyn artist Vito Acconci’s House of Cars #2, and Atlanta-based Richard Martin’s Global Peace Containers in Jamaica, an entire community constructed from converted shipping containers.

Aided by the Internet, fewer people are bound to their jobs by location and are opting to live in rural areas. Chapter 2, “Move to the Sticks” focuses on nontraditional country abodes that work in harmony with their surroundings. Unlike conventional country cabins, these homes disappear into the landscape, as is the case with Michael Reynolds’ Earthships, float on water like Jean-Michel Ducanelle’s Aquasphere, or rest in the trees such as Softroom’s Tree House. As with other dwellings throughout the book, many of the projects take tremendous strides toward sustainable building, including Rural Studio’s Corrugated Construction made from recycled cardboard.

Chapter 3, “Bring Your Own Building,” explores modern takes on nomadic living. In addition to discussing the plight of forced nomads, such as refugees, the homeless and other displaced people, this chapter also examines transient living as a purposeful choice, often adopted by fashionable young urbanites and the super wealthy. California architect Jennifer Siegal and New York artist Andrea Zittel revisit the mobile trailer home, while other designers explore portable pods and articles of clothing that double as architecture, also known as “clothes to live in” or “buildings to wear.”

The final chapter, “Space Invaders,” discusses innovative methods of inhabiting the rare empty spaces left in cities. Through stacking, hanging, inserting and inflating, these homes playfully reclaim unused urban gaps. Many tap into underutilized resources, such as New York-based Michael Rakowitz’s inflatable homeless shelters which attach to the ventilation systems of public buildings. Others hang outside windows or are inserted into the existing infrastructure, such as LOT/EK’s Guzman Penthouse which rests on top of a Manhattan skyscraper.

Well-written and generously illustrated with photographs, drawings and plans, this exciting new book provides a sampling of the most cutting-edge developments in residential housing. Whether spurred by the latest advances in technology or the scarce resources of poverty, these homes challenge our traditional notions of what a house can be and demonstrate architecture’s ability to shape the way we live. They will undoubtedly set the standard for where and how we live, now and in the future.

Other featured dwellings by: Cal-Earth, FAT, Doug Garofalo, Herman Hertzberger, Doug Jackson, Jones, Partners: Architecture, Lacaton & Vassal, Atelier van Lieshout, Greg Lynn FORM, Monolithic Dome Institute, N55, Oosterhuis.nl, OpenOffice, Po.D., Marjetica Potrc, Michael Rakowitz, Jessica Stockholder, Sarah Wigglesworth, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, among others.

And here's my amazon.com review of Dick's Counter-Clock World, posted four years ago, when the book was long out of print:

Packs more paradoxes to the page than the brain can handle, July 10, 1998

Dick attempts the impossible task of making time seem to flow backwards as the reader moves forward through the book. An eerie and unforgettable premise has the dead being "born" in their graves, crying out to be exhumed so they can begin their reverse trek through life. In other scenes food is vomited onto plates and then boxed and returned to the shelf, while bodily wastes are ingested through a "sogum pipe," a process alluded to several times but mercifully never depicted. Eventually the book reaches an action-packed climax (shouldn't it have occurred at the beginning?), in which bullets are sucked back into firearms and so forth, but by that time the paradoxes have come so fast and furious that the reader's brain has imploded. As in so many of his novels, Dick throws too many balls in the air to keep the juggling act going, and as scientifically plausible fiction, it's a mess, but only a genius would have attempted an idea as weird as this one, and taken it as far as Dick does.

i have nothing worth while to say, i just thought i should make a comment because no one else did. i feel bad because you put so much into these entries. *sigh*
- pamela (guest) 11-22-2002 5:13 am

Thanks, Pamela. When these posts get no comments I usually assume it means (1) what I've written about is so obscure or stupid that no one can reasonably be expected to have an opinion or (2) everyone agrees and is silently saying "Word up!" This post falls into the former category. Counter-Clock World is one of those books I'm glad exists even though I had to fish my first moldy copy out of a second-hand bookstore rack. A world where everything happens backwards--where people say goodbye when they arrive and hello when they leave. Brilliant! Mine has been the only amazon.com review for years. Seven people voted the review "helpful" and one grouch voted it "unhelpful." But, in spite of the apparent apathy, the book is being reissued by a major publisher! In the Internet era nothing is really obscure.

Off the subject, I also liked Brotherhood of the Wolf. I saw it in the theatre, and one of the guys behind me couldn't read so his friend was loudly paraphrasing the subtitles for him. "Mani's like a full blooded Indian and shit."
- tom moody 11-22-2002 8:55 am

i didn't comment on it because i've never read that book. i haven't read a book in a really long time. hm, since april. too busy! and i hate to go to the library because i lost harlan ellison's deathbird stories and i think they'll make me pay for it. brotherhood of the wolf wasn't as good the second time i saw it. i think it was mostly because the people looked uglier than i'd remembered and one guy had a mullet. too bad you didn't get to watch it without the paraphrasing. why would an illiterate person want to watch a subtitled movie? or was he just slow sometimes. it could've been funny if you helped him out and just made fun of the movie like in mystery science theater 3000.
- pamela (guest) 11-23-2002 7:48 pm

What? They didn't have mullets in France in the 1700s? I think those guys came to the theatre because Brotherhood was being hyped as a kung fu movie--they weren't expecting to have to read. (Also I neglected to mention they left halfway through). Sorry to hear you're on the lam from the library. I haven't read Deathbird Stories, but I like Ellison a lot. He's one of the best ranters in the biz.

Well, Counter-Clock World arrived and I have to report I hate the cover. There's a fuzzed out picture of an analog clock dial with two bald green plasticine Photoshop people--a man and a woman--standing in front of it. They appear to be vibrating, as if passing through a time portal or whatever. Corny! But then, I'm not sure how you'd depict a world where time flowed backwards. Any scene from the book would be frozen, so you wouldn't know which "direction"--towards the future or past--it was going. In the '60s they might have done a wacky splitscreen illustration with a baby shaking its rattle in a grave on one side and an old person in a cradle on the other. That would have been dumb, too, but truer to the spirit of the book.
- tom moody 11-24-2002 4:04 am

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEW HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! look at me now!! official member of digital media tree!!! heh, thanks Tom! :)



you really don't like photoshop very much, do you? why not? i've been sooo jealous of people who can do digital rendering and airbrushing, i've been trying to get better at it myself. but i don't know now. most likely i'll be using illustrator and photoshop a lot for graphic design, but after reading some of your posts i'm hesitant to use it for anything else. like last week i was drawing in class and this boy recommended i use a blending stomp to even out values where some lead overlapped. but i told him it was a drawing and that happens, and blending stomps show little control (unless they're used with oil pastels; i think they look good then). i don't know about using rubbing alcohol to blend color markers on marker paper, either. what's happening to me??!?
- pamela 11-24-2002 11:02 pm

Welcome to the tree! Let me know if you want to set up your own page (public, private, or friends only). I can send you more specifics in an email, if you're interested. Also, it won't happen till Jim gets back from vacation. (We're all awaiting his first posts from Austria.)

As for Photoshop, here's a quote I like, from the artist John Simon: "I believe artists who work from a strong personal vision will make interesting art with Photoshop or anything else they find necessary to realize their ideas.That said, using a software tool by just following the demos and the menus is going to produce very similar results."

The problem with the Dick cover is that it's unimaginative use of Photoshop. You take a photo of a head, digitally remove the hair, color the whole thing green, and Voila!--weird alien. I know there's a lot of technique in making it seamless--more than I have at this point--but I don't care about the technique if the idea is old hat.

As for various ways to shade drawings: It's all good, if you have a good idea. (I've never used alcohol to smear colored pencil. For years I used a brush and water to make ink washes by wetting the lines I made with "rolling writer"-type ballpoint pens.)
- tom moody 11-25-2002 1:08 am

I think aliens are cliché to begin with, but yeah, that's a lame way of making them. You could do a better cover.

I never thought of wetting ink from ink pens. It's a good idea. Can you use alcohol to smear colored pencil? I've never tried it, either. I used it with color markers for a while, just because prisma color markers cost so much and with a page covered in alcohol you can use the ink sparingly, like watercolors.

Do you sketch a lot? I think it would be neat if you scanned in sketches and working ideas for people to see.
- pamela 11-26-2002 12:23 am

Whoops! You said "color marker" and I read "colored pencil." I was thinking about when I was a kid--a friend of mine said you could moisten Prismacolor pencils to get washes. It was a disaster! It took a day to render one comic book panel that way--the notebook paper kept tearing.

I've been thinking about doing some kind of online sketchbook. I started one a while back but it turned into an archive of older paintings. I've been uploading Paintbrush drawings for a while, and Jim just created the means to make a thumbnail page so our uploads can be viewed at a glance. That's kind of a sketchbook.

Here's one of those drawings I did with a Uniball Onyx (cheap) pen, brush, and water. Some kind of modern sculpture a la Disney in the '40s. Just to give you an idea of the technique...

- tom moody 11-26-2002 11:10 pm

it's awesome!! i wish i had a sculpture of one of those. hm, it looks like there's a molecule on the back of the page trying to come through.

i like your thumbnail page. maybe you could put it in a frame on your index/main page so people can look at your art right away? i like doing that.
- pamela 11-28-2002 4:20 am

You're right, I didn't even notice that molecule. (It's a drawing on the next page of the pad.)

I'm still thinking about the thumbnail page. Jim has created something that does instantly what it would have taken hours for me to code. My current archives have dimensions, dates, etc. Maybe the resizing feature of the upload page could be combined with the existing slide show/thumbnail templates? (That's semi-rhetorical question for Jim.)
- tom moody 11-28-2002 10:24 pm

xtreme house (in breif article w/ "the next house" and "open house" - all poss reveiws) in the times on thursday 12/19 nyt house and home section / clumped here for net w/ other x-mas related gift book articles. tore out hard copy for tm to mail courtenay if u wanit.


- bill 12-21-2002 12:45 am

Great, thanks, Bill. Here's the non sign in (I think) link, and the text:

"Xtreme Houses" by Courtenay Smith and Sean Topham (Prestel, paperback, $35) gives inspiration a hard push in new directions. Why not stacked sandbag walls as in a London house or paper tube walls for a villa in Japan? The very definition of house is put to the test in the "nomambule," an inflatable room that collapses into a backpack.

Was there any more in the print edition? Please do hang onto it for me.
- tom moody 12-21-2002 12:56 am

no thats it / i'll put it where my cat wont throw up on it till i see you next
- bill 12-21-2002 1:33 am

hi

- anonymous (guest) 6-12-2006 3:08 pm

hello i think that this bok is extremley fun and interesting
- i rok 4 eva n eva (guest) 6-12-2006 3:10 pm