Aggregat456 has a great review of a fascinating book called The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper, a heavily illustrated account of the underlying structure, social impact, engineering challenges and urban shifts of skyscrapers.
Similarly, The Heights uses its sumptuous graphics to present a performative and descriptive (i.e. anatomical) look at skyscrapers. To do so, Ascher abandons the impulse to conflate “skyscraper” with “architecture” and presents tall buildings more as urban objects. Repeating and elaborating the formula that made her earlier graphic study on infrastructure, The Works: Anatomy of a City (2005), so successful, Ascher offers the reader hundreds of drawings, as crisp as legible as anything offered by Ernst Neufert or Otto Neurath, all showing how skyscrapers are, in essence, compact, vertical cities. This emphasis on verticality goes well beyond the book’s title: The Heights is organized in a roughly vertical fashion, with some parts dedicated to the laying of foundations, and others showing how concrete is pumped towards upper floor plates via a complex series of compressors and tubes. (The table of contents even appears as an elevator control panel, which seems counter-intuitive unless one starts thinking of The Heights as vertical.)
(via Crib Candy)
