Building Big
David Macaulay

What do bridges, tunnels, dams, domes, and skyscrapers have in common? In association with a PBS series, Macaulay has brought his particular drawing style to each. I've never before seen a drawing of a dam from underneath. It turns out that the Aswan High dam on the Nile has a grout curtain going 600 feet down to prevent water from undermining the dam. In one large drawing Macaulay makes it clear how this was done.

I had carefully read Stephen Cassady's Spanning the Gate, but didn't really understand how the anchor blocks had been put together, or how the wire spinning process had worked. Again, a few of Macaulay's sketched cleared things up for me, and allowed me to better appreciate the historical photographs in Cassady's work. Although a photograph can show you everything visible, sometimes you need to see what is hidden in order to makes sense of the whole.

Making sense of the whole is what the book is about. Macaulay tries to answer the questions; "Why this shape and not that?", "Why steel instead of concrete or stone?", "Why put it here and not over there?". He breaks some of the largest structures that humanity have built into understandable chunks, showing cutaway detail or how the various stresses are handled. Often there is a whimsical touch to show scale, such as men working or a car parked beside a penstock.

The bridges are Ponte Fabricio, Iron Bridge, Britannia Bridge, Garabit Viaduct, Firth of Forth, Golden Gate Bridge, and Ponte de Normandie. The tunnels are Two Ancient Tunnels, Hoosac Tunnel, Thames Tunnel, Holland Tunnel, Channel Tunnel, and The Big Dig in Boston. The dams are Ita Dam, Hoover Daam, Aswan High Dam, and Itaipu Dam. The domes are Pantheon, Hagia Sophia, Sehzade Mosque, St. Peter's Basilica, Les Invalides, St. Paul's Cathedral, United States Capitol, and Astrodome. The skyscrapers are the Reliance Building, Woolworth Building, Chrysler Building, Empire State Building, John Hancock Center, World Trade Center, Sears Tower, Citigroup Center, Petronas Towers, and Commerzbank Frankfurt.

Although the Library of Congress has this classed as a book for juveniles, it's enchanting for adults interested in how things are put together. The book doesn't just deal with how the structure itself works, but sometimes shows how it was constructed. Now, if he could just tell me how they get the crane off the top of a 50 story building once it's built.

Building Big, by David Macaulay. Houghton Mifflin Company Boston 2000.
ISDN 0-395-96331-1