Book excerpt: In 1988, photographer Sandy Sorlien set out on a series of journeys to document the rich architectural heritage that America is losing to the cheap and banal design aesthetic of tract housing, strip malls, and big-box stores. Her seven-year odyssey took her over 90,000 miles of back roads to every state in the Union in search of homes that reflect and define the region in which they stand. After making over a thousand house portraits, Sorlien has chosen one representative image from each state and collected them in this volume.