This is about optimising our dwelling place. It's about anything that relates you to our housing - people's housing; a phenomenon. Practical explanation and inspiration are shown through true-life romance, adventure and frustration. Design-fertiliser, colour, quantities, art, acts, whys and wherefores. Dweller balancing acts. Misconceptions, problems and paranoia will be resolved towards understanding. We're looking at technicality, psychology, budgets, evolution, lifestyle and brave moves. Housefandango; us on the move, keeping the looming ego of science under the intuitive wings of our rhythm. A multiperson romance as we dance, leaving only bio-tracks, on our earthy floor. A heart focus here is the huge activity interface bonding nomad and settler with domestic contraption; the activity of housing and the returning action of houses. HouseFandango is for serious home-makers, poorly housed underdogs, the genius compromised by accommodation, lifestylers, ecologists, sociologists, students, practitioners, those floundering on a mortgage tether, perplexed about the time and money costs of their house and its location. It brings the spirit of Henry Thoreau together with building regulations and synthetics. It contains a cousin to 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. The beautiful spirit-of-house works of Witold Rybczynski ('Home') and Alain de Botton ('Architecture of Happiness') offer no comparative breadth; a marketplace vortex is there to grasp HouseFandango. It is to the universal person but written to the popular West. General public, digest, architecture, sociology, politics, ecology, environment and fun. A couching of the science of housing, connecting the academic, the lay, the builder, engineer, artist, dweller, nomads, settlers and the in-between. Bobby, Little White Cloud, Global Pale and Cheekybugger. Encampments, mud huts, Hollywood Boulevard, cottages and dwelling machines.
AUTHOR PROFILE Monte John Latham BA(EnvDes)GradDip Australian Institute of Architects A+Member was born in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia mid 20th century. Behind professional reports and two exhibitions he has been both amateur painting and writing since he was fifteen. His life has moved through thirty-five different domicile circumstances. He married thirty-three years ago, producing five vibrant children. He began an Architecture course thirty-five years ago and left it for eight years, out of disgust for social values, to work as a farmhand, artist and draughtsman. Thirty years ago he was moved to write a book for publication - 'Dream House, the complete romance and handbook'. The book doubled as a thesis for a BA(Environmental Design) and this found him returned to Architecture and far too busy with study, work and children to publish. He has 3.5 decades of work experience in architecture in Australia and Wellington in a broad range of projects ranging through house design, corporate fit-out, remote area town planning and housing, municipal architecture, community ownership of townscape, local government report writing and development appraisal, urban art, settlement heritage patterns and so on. He has liaised with professionals and bureaucrats of many specialties. Since completing the thesis draft of his book now long ago the author has been keeping references and notes; even lifting a pie bag from the ground at a Bob Dillon concert in Wellington to catch a thought. Under pressure he has now spent intense months to revamp that same book. It respects academics but writes to the heart of hearts of the person rather than the professional; the professional can interpret, to suit a professional task. In what is now titled HouseFandango the author has written a unique book with a style that is not common to authors with an academic capacity satisfactory to produce it. There may be others who would pull together the serious threads addressed but where are they. HouseFandango is a product of experience and intent specific to its author. Follow up books are planned - The Lounge Room, the Architecture of Fire and The Nomurbic Office.
