Interior Design Since 1900 (World of Art)

I purchased this book because it was the required text for my "History of Architecture and Interior Design since 1900" college course - I am an interior design major, changing careers in middle age. Thank heavens, we thought, finally an instructor picks a cheap book instead of the usual $100+ beasts! Unfortunately, we students got exactly what we paid for.The book is incredibly dry, to start with. I had to read a few pages, stop, go do something else for a little while, come back, read a few more pages, rinse and repeat, because I got bored very quickly. Specialist terms were frequently used but left undefined in the text, and the book has no glossary. The index is very superficial, many things should have been indexed and were not. (People often overlook the importance of the index in text and reference books, but it is a crucial element to the book's effectiveness as a whole.) I also found the book a bit shallow. There was not as much discussion as I would have liked of how outside events influenced the changes in design, so sometimes it didn't make much sense why things happened. The book also should be more accurately titled "Interior Design In Western/Central Europe and The United States Since 1900", since it almost totally ignored the rest of the world, with a very occasional bone thrown to Japan (but mostly regarding how Japan influenced European and American designers...). Many photographs in the book are of rather low quality and I was often able to find far better ones with Google Images searches (but should I have _had_ to do that when I already bought a darn textbook?). It was somewhat annoying to have dim black-and-white photos that did not show all that much detail in the book when even this fairly inexperienced layperson could, surprisingly often, find much clearer black-and-white and even color photographs, and many photos were too small to show much detail when a simple change in the page layout would have enabled using a much larger photograph in the same space. I showed the book to an acquaintance who is a book designer and she thought it could have been much better arranged to maximize the photography (and in such a visually-oriented field of study, we need our pictures!). One thing that I found especially frustrating was that the author would often describe a room or space in extended detail, but no photos would be shown, and other pictures had little accompanying discussion. Perhaps future editions of the book should be accompanied by an online or CD supplement with much more plentiful, higher-resolution images, if the cost of actually printing better photographs in a hardcopy book is prohibitive - as it was, I always had to have my computer close at hand when reading this book so that I could look up terms and photos when the book fell short.I also found the book to be just plain uncomfortable to read, although I will grant it's a comfortable size to hold. The typeface is quite small, with tight spacing between lines, but with very wide margins on the page, which seems an inefficient use of the page space and often leads to the "wall of text" problem. I dislike marking up books but I had to do a lot of highlighting to catch the nuggets of information buried in the tightly packed blocks of text. The very glossy paper catches the light and glares something awful - I know the argument that the slick paper is better for photographs but if there's so much glare on the page in brighter light that you can't see the photos very well to begin with, or you have to read with lights dimmed to minimize the glare on the page to make the text readable so you can't see the photos clearly that way either, how does that accomplish anything? This wasn't just a "you're getting old, lady" problem, many of my classmates who are straight out of high school grumbled about the same issues. The instructor was quite torn about whether to use the book again as she doesn't particularly like it either, but the other textbooks on the subject (such as the Pile and Harwood texts) were more suited to a full-year course and overkill for our needs, although I will probably purchase one or the other for my own use.

great textbook!

Shipped on time and in good condition. Good book. Kinda boring but still interesting. Lots of pictures, which is crucial to remembering different styles. I would recommend outside research to get more of a look at the different styles. Google images perhaps.

The book delivered what you would expect for the price. It's more of a general overview of the history. It's a good reference for those who are just becoming interested in the subject matter

Great book

I am not a professional architect or designer, just a buff, but I thought this was a great overview of interior design since 1900. The text is cogent, and even though I sometimes wished the book was larger in format, the photographs are well chosen and very nicely reproduced. This is easily recommended to anyone who's interested in the subject. One thing I found interesting is that after about 1970, interior design goes from being distinctive and coherent to being a muddle with no clear dominant style. One wonders what happened.

Another great little Thames & Hudson book. They're excellent for history and overview but a little short on inspiration. Too many b& W photos for the visually based reader but gives the basic idea. After all, it's only a small book.

I wonder if I have got an original copy of this book. What book on interior design contains solely black and white illustrations and photographs - no colour. Also pages look like photocopies. It is completely uninspiring to read!

If you're into that, this is a useful summary with some individualistic interpretations.Not bad.

This looks totally counterfeit. Pages are essentially photocopies. Cover is poor resolution and images are all black and white. Awful.