Building: 3,000 Years of Design, Engineering, and Construction

From Egypt and Classical Greece and Rome through the building booms of the Gothic era and the Renaissance, and from the Industrial Revolution to the present era of digital modeling, Building: 3,000 Years of Design, Engineering, and Construction, charts centuries of innovations in engineering and building construction. This comprehensive and heavily illustrated volume, aimed at students and young professionals as well as general readers, explores the materials, classic texts, instruments, and theories that have propelled modern engineering, and the famous and not-so-famous buildings designed through the ages, from the Parthenon to Chartres Cathedral and the dome of St. Peter’s, from eighteenth-century silk mills in England to the Crystal Palace, and on to the first Chicago high-rises, the Sydney Opera House, and the latest “green” skyscrapers. The book concentrates on developments since the industrial and scientific revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Incorporated within the continuous narrative are sidebars with short biographies of eminent engineers, excerpts from classic texts, stories of individual projects of major importance, and brief histories of key concepts such as calculus. Also included are extensive reference materials: appendices, a glossary, bibliography, and index.

Review

“The strength of this ambitious publication is its linking of technical development to the social and cultural context.”-Building Design “A labour of love… Chronicles everything from geometric pattern in medieval cathedrals to the most daring uses of reinforced concrete.”-Wallpaper* “More than 800 photographs, plans and drawings bring to life some of architecture’s greatest achievements.”-Financial Times “This is a truly heavyweight publication which every student of engineering and architecture should have highlighted on their first-year reading list.”-Alex Wright, architect, Architects’ Journal

About the Author

William Addis is a consulting engineer at Buro Happold in London and the author of numerous books, academic papers, and book reviews on construction history published over the past 25 years. He holds a doctorate degree in the history and philosophy of engineering from the University of Reading, where he taught this subject for 15 years; he has also delivered lecture courses on engineering history at Cambridge University, the University of Bath, and University College, London. In 1998, he helped curate the exhibition “The Art of the Engineer” at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and contributed to the book that accompanied the exhibition. Addis is an active member of the Institution of Structural Engineers’ History Study Group and lectures at professional conferences around the world.