Super Structures: Inside the World's Most Spectacular Buildings

Here is a collection of the world’s most imposing, breathtaking, and sometimes eccentric, structures. There is a building from nearly every continent, within a time span from Diocletian’s Palace in 300 CE to the proposed Spaceport in New Mexico, which is barely off the drawing board. Some of them, like the Empire State building or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, are familiar. Others were new to me: the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, the Moscow Underground and the Millau Viaduct in southern France. The emphasis is on architectural aspiration, and engineering problems and their solutions, conveyed in the usual double page layout, a generous helping of photographic images, text scattered across the page in post-it note style, and two fold-out spreads. The presentation certainly succeeds in impressing on the reader the amazing scale of the projects; and the vision, ingenuity and determination necessary to bring them to fruition. However, I am not a fan of the style of illustration, which seems to be used by more than one publisher, and comes off the conveyor belt of an Italian design workshop or workshops (in this case credited to Inklink, Firenze). It worries me, too, that the text claims that the slits in castle towers for archers to use are known as ‘murder holes’, because I know the term really refers to holes in the ceilings of castle gateways not archery loops. I hope that the rest of the information has been more carefully checked.