The much-awaited BLDGBLOG book is out. Sounds like the visually-stunning, encyclopaedic tour de force we’ve been expecting:
“It’s got five major chapters and a huge bibliography; it’s got interviews, full-color photo spreads (by Simon Norfolk! David Maisel! Edward Burtynsky! Ilkka Halso! Bas Princen! and more!), as well as original illustrations by my colleague at Dwell, Brendan Callahan; it’s got maps and plans and architectural sections; it’s got renderings; it’s got 19th-century British ruin paintings, W.G. Sebald, and J.G. Ballard; it’s got FAT, geology, and rogue tunneling machines; it’s got urban farming, icebergs, archaeology, and Archigram; it’s got a saddle-stitched paperback binding that can open up flat, as well as multi-colored paper and an awesome use of a changing page grid; it’s got two original comic strips by BLDGBLOG (my first!), drawn by Joe Alterio and printed on the inside covers; it’s got runaway climate change, undersea cathedrals, artificial reefs, lost cities, oceangoing utopias, and the Chinese Olympics; it’s got injected landforms, spray-foam monuments to the nuclear power industry, Gustave Doré’s black and white visions of the underworld, and the architecture of Gothic horror; it’s got blimps, retractable villages on the British coast, the San Andreas Fault, underground warfare in the mountains of Afghanistan, and a short interview with Alex Trevi (among so many other interviews! dozens! from Sir Peter Cook, Sam Jacob, and DJ /rupture to Lebbeus Woods and Mary Beard); it’s got exploding stars, simulated mountain ranges on Venus, Mars habitats, and a quantum tomb for Albert Einstein; it’s got Minsuk Cho, China Miéville, Christopher Wren, Frederick the Great, and Paradise Lost.”
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