Author Description

Building in the hills is an enterprise full of unpleasant surprises and traps just waiting to snare the inexperienced. Arthur Levin, a structural engineer and architect who has been involved in more than 2,000 hillside projects, offers a distillation of his 35 years of experience that will help the uninitiated to avoid the otherwise inevitable pitfalls and traps. The book has many real life examples of the unexpected encounters with unstable land, surface drainage problems, subterranean water, demanding owners, uncooperative building inspectors, inexperienced contractors, and other examples of the author's triumphs and occasional enlightening failures. All of these brief histories are instructive and guaranteed to be of invaluable help to the first or second time hillside designer and builder. More than 110 line drawings illuminate the text.