Buildings That Changed the World

I've just finished this book. It really frustrated me (especially at the end). It could have been so much better.

The format of the book was two pages per building, typically with the left page containing a description of the building and some of the history behind it (including a lengthy quote from somebody who'd been up close and personal with the structure) and the right page containing a large color photograph of said building. The left page usually also had a couple of small images too.

That seems reasonable. It would have helped if the text had focused on just the history of the building in question without side-tracking off onto juicy facts about the owners or others involved with it. There simply wasn't enough room to do both. Perhaps there should have been four pages per building. It sure would have been nice to see the inside of some of them. It would also have been an improvement if there weren't so many large globs of white space that could have been filled in with other interesting text or images. Perhaps they thought this was a coffee table book even though the format was really too small for that.

But here's where the book simply didn't meet my expectations.

Let's deconstruct the book title for a moment: Buildings That Changed the World. Now I went to dictionary.com and looked up building and one of the definitions I got was:

n 1: a structure that has a roof and walls and stands more or less permanently in one place; "there was a three-story building on the corner"; "it was an imposing edifice" [syn: edifice]

The book includes a lot of man made structures that don't fall exactly under that definition. Viaducts, bridges, towers. Okay, I can be flexible. Most of them were impressive.

What about "Changed the World"? One of the examples included in the book was Niki de Saint Phalle's Tarot Garden. I'd never heard of this. Now I admit I'm sometimes not as worldly as I should be, and the media coverage in Australia and the U.S. usually only focuses on things that are happening in that country (or to their citizens abroad), so I could have easily missed the announcement of the completion of this important piece of work, but could somebody please explain to me how a garden full of sculptures has changed the world? Where were the entries in this book for either the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal (or both)? Now surely they qualify if you can have sculptures or viaducts.

The last entry in the book was for The Millenium Tower. It wasn't until I'd finished reading all the text that I realised that this isn't built yet. It has a very realistic large picture that makes you think this is for real. The book is copyright 1999. From googling around, I see that the project has a completion date of 2009, but that this is now uncertain. If the building had been completed, it would have changed the world as it would have gone a long way to help solve the real estate problem in Tokyo. But it doesn't exist yet, so in my mind it's unsuitable for this book. Why didn't they finish with something like the Petronas Twin Towers?

So when all is said and done, unlike the two Amazon reviewers, I'd give it two stars, not four. If you really must get it, do what I did and buy a cheap second hand copy.

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( Aug 20 2005, 09:52:12 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink