1001 Traditional Construction Details

This book is completely frustrating. It holds such promise, or perhaps I should say the author does. He clearly knows his stuff, and theres no question that theres extremely useful information here. But anyone who knows architectural detailing knows that there are many, many aspects of construction that are not even touched on in this volume.

In all fairness, neither the author nor the publisher claim that this book is all things to all people, but with a total of 1001 details (a figure I trust is accurate - I havent counted them), one cant help but be disappointed that over 20% of them are all related to custom cabinets, or that there are 30 different examples of window/door elevations all showing brick veneer and stone/brick lintels, with the only difference being the size of the stone. Likewise, there are something close to 20 different door head details, all showing a stone lintel of varying size, brick veneer and wood stud framing.

Please tell me what the point of this kind of padding is. Why are all of these details necessary when one or two drawings with a few carefully chosen notes can explain the various possible permutations? If you as the reader think youre going to get 1001 details of different construction conditions, youre going to be as disappointed as I was. And the frustrating part of all of this is that the details are good. Damned good. I might quibble with his point of view on text in drawings (he makes a good case for legibility of text through the use of serif fonts rather than the ones that emulate hand drawn "architectural" lettering), but then throws any notion of legibility out the window by clustering all of his notes together with no line spacing between one note and the next. Still, the drawn information is good, just not of the quantity or variety to be worthy of the title "1001...Details." Im even wrestling with the notion of returning the book, but Ill probably keep it since it does have useful information in it, and Im a packrat when it comes to that sort of thing. But I wont feel good about it, especially when I think of what this could have been.