Dwellings: The Vernacular House World Wide. (Reviews: Lessons in Common Sense).

By Paul Oliver. London: Phaidon. 2003. [pounds sterling]35

This is an up to date and fully revised version of Oliver's previous Dwellings: the house across the world, and it may also, perhaps, be seen as a personal postscript to his vast Encyclopedia of the Vernacular Architecture of the World (AR March 1998). Summoning up a lifetime's research, this new edition of the earlier book is imaginatively organized by theme, starting with buildings that are built up out of the ground and ending with sections devoted to applied decoration and to abstract, anthropological factors that unite widely differing peoples. To have steered a clear path through so many types of architecture, without flagging and without repetition, is a remarkable achievement, and the many photographs in this book are mostly of the very highest quality, and superbly reproduced.

The combination of architects and anthropology is problematic, but Oliver mostly avoids preaching. What every architect can certainly learn here is that many hundreds of vernacular building types offer endless examples of commonsense building technology; and no lesson of this kind should ever be wasted. In spite of natural and man-made horrors, and the inevitable effects of urbanization, there is some evidence here that living standards can be raised without traditional methods being abandoned: we have for example a scheme in Nairobi where residents build their own houses onto standardized sanitary cores. Ignore two irritating errors -- the mislabelling of Flemish and English brick bonds, and a curious double slip involving the Gilbert Scott family -- you will find an attractive, valuable and provocative book.