An essential tool for architects, interior designers, set designers, and related professionals, this book offers a rich library of visual references for every research need.

CD-ROM included: easy-to-use screen-resolution JPEG files of every image and the complete glossary of terms!

Excerpt: A theme-park designer once told me that the most diffi­cult part of designing is getting everything to connect in the corners. She added that anyone with some talent could produce a workable design and draw a handsome elevation, but the skill of a designer was in working out the details. How do courses of brickwork accommodate the shape of an arch? Exactly what happens at the inter-section of two stone walls? What is the profile of a molding where a cornice wraps around the corner of a building? Solving these problems with style and ele­gance is the hallmark of good design; the resulting solu­tions are the structural and decorative details that are emblematic of historic periods and become the signa­tures of individual styles and designers.

All artists, including illustrators, animators, and scenic designers, explore architectural details as they render or replicate scenes and environments. Using the correct style of window or appropriate floor and wall fin­ishes often signals the authenticity of the artist's work. Accuracy is particularly important to successful design now, because we have experienced an explosion of visu­al information, so widely communicated that there are few people who have not been exposed to an extensive file of images. Audiences of all ages, therefore, are visu­ally very sophisticated. They may have acquired this education by osmosis, but they have come to expect believable architecture in everything from film sets and theme parks to the textures found in video game envi­ronments.

Architectural Surfaces: Details for Artists, Architects, and Designers is a collection of photographs of architecture, focusing on specific details and elements of buildings. In most cases, organizing the pictures topically was obvi­ous: windows went into one chapter; ceilings and roofs fit nicely into another. However, when it came to walls, it became apparent that the group of images was in danger of being too unwieldy to organize. So, the images are divided into two chapters "Walls" and "Facades." The first contains subjects made from gener­ally structural materials, such as stone, wood, and brick. The second groups pictures about walls made frommaterials generally applied to a structure, such as glass and metal curtain walls and architectural terracotta. This method of classification sometimes may seem a bit arbi­trary, as in the case of stone veneer ("Walls"), which should technically be grouped with other curtain walls ("Facades"). But stone is perceived as a structural mater­ial, and the details of coursing and joints in a stone veneer is parallel to that of solid stone construction.

Pictorial research is easier to use if images are filed into specific categories of visually kindred subjects. With this in mind, the chapters are further broken down into sections concentrating on parts of the general topic. For example, "Doorways" is divided into paneled doors, battened doors, painted doors, metal doors, transom lights and side lights, entryways, gates, and door hard-ware. These categories are not intended to explain the individual parts of a doorway, but to isolate various aspects of doors and entryways in order to present dif­ferent types and styles within the category.

Within this structure, the index is very much a navi­gational tool intended to help users find specific archi­tectural details. The subject keywords in the captions are used in the index. Architectural elements tend to over-lap categories, and not all examples of a topic are con-fined to a single chapter. For example, an interesting Palladian window in a photo showing a particular type of roof dormer is located in "Ceilings & Roofs," but the window style is named in the caption and cross-refer­enced in the index. All entries in the index give an image number that refers both to the picture in the book and to the image on the CD-ROMs.

The captions were compiled with the help of special­ists and with additional information from a variety of sources. Since most of the identifications were made only from the photographs, any inaccuracy lies with the author. Most of the architectural terms used in the cap­tions are defined in the glossary.