Uncommon Structures, Unconventional Builders - Tapa dura

Here are the amazing, enlightening, fully illustrated stories of the most remarkable constructions of human history. Seventeen vividly written, lively, and detailed chronicles of our most ambitious and legendary building projects, how they were launched with vision and high hopes, and the many twists and turns they took as they came into being. Wide-ranging in scope, encompassing a myriad of cultures, time periods and building materials - and even venturing into the animal kingdom, in the case of the uniquely constructed birds' nests - this book is full of human ingenuity and vision as well as adventures in engineering and architecture. Sir Christopher Wren; Ireland's Curious Towers; Tower of Babel; Designs for the Haunted House; Lost City of the Incas; Birds' Nests; Petra; High Gothic; Great Wall of China; Heorot - Home of Beowulf; Igloos; Cabins & Cottages; Neolithic Houses; Shakespeare's Globe; Vaux-le-Vicomte, Fouquet's Folly; Jericho; Colossus of Rhodes; Fully illustrated with full colour and black-and-white photography, historic drawings and plans, fine art and line drawings. A celebration of architectural vision and achievement, of lateral thinking to overcome technical problems.

Breathtaking. Magnificent. Unique. Very Special. Exquisite. One-of-a-kind. Well researched. Beautifully designed. (Robert J. Bruss, Tribune Media Services)

"An eye-popping shelf-scraperTan elevating experience." (Gene Shalit, "Today")

"You may get vertigo looking at SkyscrapersT" (The New York Times)

Like towering divas, skyscrapers command the urban stage. They hold us enthralled, leaving us anticipating and half-fearing their next majestic manifestation. The roles played by the skyscraper and many: they are icons of cities, stars of movies, symbols of corporate power, and the place where many of us report to work every morning. Deemed both avatars and annihilators of civilized life, they have been praised as efficient space-savers and denounced as rapacious consumers of light and air. In short, the skyscraper's bold visual gestalt, one layered with multiple meanings, has become a complex metaphor for all that is good and bad about the twentieth century. (Judith Dupre, from the Foreword)

I think the interesting question is why does man want to build to the sky? What is there about the desire for domination, or to reach God, or for private pride - the Pyramids are an example of that, but the tall building is certainly another. Every civilization is touched by that desireT They all reached for a dominant height. The impulse may have been different, but that's a common feeling of must culture. (Philip Johnson, from the Introductory Interview)