Dreams of Iron and Steel, Brunelleschi & Bauhaus

Dreams of Iron and Steel

From the London sewers that banished cholera to the Panama Canal that shaved thousands of miles off a dangerous sea passage, from the Hoover Dam that diverted the world's most unpredictable river to give power to over half of the country to the transcontinental railroad that fulfilled the dream of manifest destiny, Dreams of Iron and Steel reveals the epic struggles and personal stories of the most brilliant pioneers of the industrial age, and the financiers and politicians who hung on for the ride as fortunes and reputations were lost and won.
Dreams of Iron and Steel: Seven Wonders of the Nineteenth Century, from the Building of the London Sewers to the Panama Canal by Deborah Cadbury
ISBN: 0007163061

Pushing the Limits of engineering

Henry Petroski tells the stories of significant and daring enterprises - some familiar, some virtually unknown, and some that are still only dreams - in their historical and technological contexts. Among the achievements are Philadelphia's landmark Benjamin Franklin Bridge, London's incomparable Tower Bridge, and China's ambitious Three Gorges Dam project. But pushing the limits of technology does not come without risk. Petroski also chronicles great technological disasters, such as the 1928 failure of California's St. Francis Dam, the 1999 tragedy of the Texas A&M Bonfire, and the September 11, 2001, collapse of New York's World Trade Center towers. He deals with other calamities as well, such as the 1994 earthquake that struck Southern California and the embarrassingly wobbly Millennium Bridge in London, which had to be shut down only three days after it opened.
Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering by Henry Petroski
ISBN: 1400040515

Remaking the World

This collection of informative and pleasurable essays by Henry Petroski elucidates the role of engineers in shaping our environment in countless ways, big and small. In Remaking the World Petroski gravitates this time, perhaps, toward the big: the English Channel tunnel, the Panama Canal, Hoover Dam, the QE2, and the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, now the tallest buildings in the world.
Henry Petroski profiles Charles Steinmetz, the genius of the General Electric Company; Henry Martyn Robert, a military engineer who created Robert's Rules of Order; and James Nasmyth, the Scotsman whose machine tools helped shape nineteenth-century ocean and rail transportation.
Henry Petroski sifts through the fossils of technology for cautionary tales and remarkable twists of fortune, and reminds us that failure is often a necessary step on the path to new discoveries. He explains soil mechanics by way of a game of rock, scissors, paper, and clarifies fundamental principles of engineering through the spokes of a Ferris wheel.
Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering by Henry Petroski
ISBN: 0375700242

Brunelleschi's Dome

By all accounts, Filippo Brunelleschi, goldsmith and clockmaker, was an unkempt, cantankerous, and suspicious man-even by the generous standards according to which artists were judged in fifteenth-century Florence.
Filippo Brunelleschi also designed and erected a dome over the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore-a feat of architectural daring that we continue to marvel at today-thus securing himself a place among the most formidable geniuses of the Renaissance. At first denounced as a madman, Filippo Brunelleschi literally reinvented the field of architecture amid plagues, wars, and political feuds to raise seventy million pounds of metal, wood, and marble hundreds of feet in the air. Ross King's captivating narrative brings to life the personalities and intrigue surrounding the twenty-eight-year-long construction of the dome, opening a window onto Florentine life during one of history's most fascinating eras.
Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by Ross King
ISBN: 0142000159

From Bauhaus to Our House

Walter Groppius, granddaddy of steel and glass, conceived his architectural vision in the rubble of WW I and the decadence of Weimar in the decade after. His doctrine found fertile soil in America, where it was time to adopt a clearly defined and suitable representative architecture.
Tom Wolfe, author of The Painted Word and The Right Stuff, treats us to a chronicle of the trends that ultimately brought us the ubiquitous and baffling glass box of modern commerce.
From Bauhaus to Our House: Selected Poems by Tom Wolfe
ISBN: 055338063X
Bauhaus and America

Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics and the German State

This book re-evaluates the political, architectural, and artistic cultures of pre-World War I Germany. As contradictory and conflict-ridden as the German Second Reich itself, the world of architects, craftsmen and artists was not immune to the expansionist, imperialist, and capitalist struggles that transformed Germany in the quarter-century leading up to the First World War.
John Maciuika brings together architectural and design history, political history, social and cultural geography. He substantially revises our understanding of the roots of the Bauhaus and, by extension, the historical roots of twentieth-century German architecture and design. His book sheds new light on hotly contested debates pertaining to the history of Germany in the pre-World War I era, notably the issues surrounding modernity and anti-modernity in Wilhelmine Germany and the role played by the nation's most important architects in challenging the traditional aristocracy at the top of the new German economic and social order.
Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics and the German State, 1890-1920 by John V. Maciulka
ISBN: 0521790042

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