The Architecture Traveler: A Guide to 262 Key Modern American Buildings

Solidly researched, well organized book with excellent indexes. The guide is practical and well written. I enjoyed traveling with it and reading it.

If you're planning a trip in the US, this is the most up to date architecture guide. It will show you the best and the newest. Naturally it focuses on the major destination cities (New York, Chicago, LA, San Francisco). It also includes other hot architecture cities (Miami, Houston) and helps you make fascinating side trips to out of the way and unexpected sites - and concentrations of sites -- all over the country. The author presents the 263 top US buildings, one building per page. If you're tight for time, it helps you narrow down your choices by clearly identifying the must-see buildings: It features 41 New York buildings, for example, 40 in LA, and so on -- and it draws a circle around the absolutely essential Frank Gehry and Frank Lloyd Wright sites.

I like this book because it pinpoints the top architectural sites in the US that I, as a tourist, can actually see. There is no other book like it. Maps, addresses, hours, websites, and multiple indexes you can use to plan your trip by your destination city, by region, by architect, by era, or to locate a specific building.

It is often easy to visit important architectural sites just by making a quick walking tour or a short drive from your hotel ... but you have to know exactly where to look. That's the value of this classic travel guide to American architecture, now in its Sixth edition. The latest Architecture Traveler treats 263 buildings. Each page covers one building with a narrative, photos, and visitor information. In this newest edition of the guide, websites are included for many of the buildings - a real help. The Architecture Traveler itself has a website, at architecture-traveler.com. At the end of the book you'll find useful maps showing all the buildings' locations. The author, whose work appears in The New York Times and in the shelter magazines, has a real gift for finding unexpected details and for telling the behind the scenes stories of the buildings, the architects and sometimes the owners. The buildings are presented in time sequence, so you can scan across the decades by trilling the pages against your thumb. The 13 new buildings from 2000 forward will give you a quick sense of contemporary ideas, trends and new materials and techniques in American architecture. A strikingly beautiful new solar house completed in 2004 (with a monthly electricity bill of zero) was particularly interesting to me. My only criticism is the new cover, which seems sort of bland and formal compared to past covers. This classic guide has been translated into German and Chinese, and it is not uncommon to spot and greet other adventurous Architecture Travelers with this book in hand at the famous and - especially - at the slightly offbeat or lesser-known sites. The Architecture Traveler makes a good gift, as well.