Wow, Infrastructure is a great book. You should acquire it and read it. (Here, by "read" I mean "look at the photos". But you can read it, too, if you like.)
It is photographs of "infrastructure": mines, mining equipment, steel mills, utility poles, electrical transformers, dams, power plants, smokestacks, cooling towers, insulators, water towers. There is text explaining what these things are, what they do, and how that determines what they look like. There is industry, there is engineering, there is design, there is beauty.
This book is dangerous to read; it warps your thinking. I keep looking up at utility poles instead of watching where I'm walking.
- A Becherian typology of water towers, and then a collection of outliers, of playful water tower designs.
- The process of modern corn milling and its uses
- The mystery of the fake cattle guards
- The Rowan Gorilla III
- Why you pulverize coal before you burn it (with a photo of the gleaming machine that does it)
- two smokestacks: one venting visible steam, one venting invisible poison gas. Which one do the neighbors complain about?
- The evolution of the windmill
- power line splicing sleeves, dampers, and especially Stockbridge dampers
- Live-wire guys and hot sticks
- fire department callboxes don't work like you think they do
- GEO vs LEO communication sattelites
- Two paragraphs about Botts Dots "In California I once watched a road worker inspecting the Dots with a go-cart. Riding an inch or two off the road surface, he tested each Dot by banging it with a rubber mallet. The ones that rattled or moved were marked for replacement."
- An illustrated list of bridge truss designs
- Intermodal freight: history, modern practice.
- The controversy of re-spraying landfill leachate
That's not all of the topics; that's just a few I picked out while flipping through pages.
This book is a survey; it doesn't dive into any of these topics in depth. But, wow, the breadth. I learned about all kinds of new things to obsess about. You will too. Go read.
Labels: awesome, book, urban morphology