Mid-Century Modern: An Architectural Coloring Collection (Residential Lines)

Product Description

An architecture book you color in - or a coloring book serious enough to read.Thirty-four detailed line-art homes of the Mid-Century Modern era, from Palm Springs desert modernism and Case Study glass houses to Eichler atrium homes and the low-slung lake cabins of the Northwest. Ready for your pencils, markers, or watercolors.But this is more than a coloring book. It opens with an illustrated essay, The Shape of Optimism, tracing mid-century residential design from its Bauhaus roots through the postwar boom and its great regional schools - the Case Study House Program of Richard Neutra and Pierre Koenig, Joseph Eichler's democratic tract modernism, Albert Frey's Desert Modernism, Florida's Sarasota School, and the Harvard Five - with a nod to Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian houses that anticipated it all. Every plate faces a short note on the tradition it belongs to and a detail to look for, and a closing visual glossary explains the recurring elements: post-and-beam framing, breeze-block screens, butterfly rooflines, and more.Built to be worked in. Every plate is printed full bleed, edge to edge with no margins - and the reverse of each drawing is a text page, so nothing you use bleeds onto another illustration.Read it, color it, or leave it out on the coffee table. A screen-free way to slow down and unwind, and a genuine gift for design enthusiasts, architecture lovers, and anyone who colors as much for the history as for the calm.Inside this 82-page hardcover:- 34 full-page line-art plates spanning the major mid-century regional styles- An illustrated introduction to the history and regional variations of the style- A facing note for every plate - the tradition it belongs to and a detail to notice- A closing visual glossary of recurring architectural elements- A sample page shown fully colored, to inspire your own approach- Premium hardcover binding, sized for the coffee table, not the bookshelfAbout the author. Eric Steele spent forty years in the building trades - union carpenter, Local 44, then twenty years running a 52,000 square foot design-build shop. A career spent turning architects' drawings into things you could walk into. He knows what a real building looks like on paper, and that is the eye behind every plate in this book.Mid-Century Modern is Book One of Residential Lines, a six-volume collection of architectural coloring books - each devoted to a defining style of American home design, and each a standalone volume you can start with or collect in full.The illustrations in this book are AI-generated, then selected, rejected and corrected by hand. The full explanation is at linesofsteele.com.