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Loading... Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscapeby Brian Hayes
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. What are the conical structure atop flour mills and lumbermills? Why are there 3 wires running along most electric power poles? Why are TV towers red and white? Why are the blades of a windmill in the front? Hayes answers these type of questinos in this interesting book. He apparently spent about 10 years taking photos of industrial sites around the world. Here he explains what they are and why they work. His writing is also thoughtful, beginning with mining and ending with waste management, where the end products are returned to the earth. (  ) jpsnow | May 25, 2008 |  I first heard about this book from CLUI —the Center for Land Use Interpretation. It’s exactly the kind of book I’d expect them to be into, and their positive spin led me to buy it immediately. The book is huge—coffee-table sized—and full of amazing photographs ranging from distant shots of vast strip mines to detailed images of telecommunications equipment. If you’ve ever wondered what some of those objects hanging off a telephone pole were for, where your water comes from, how power is generated, or any of a large range of other elements of our society’s industrial underpinnings, you must have this book. While the book doesn’t cover everything, it does cover a lot, and it includes references (helpfully further labelled as appropriate for kids or geeks) so you can learn more. A must have for engineers, science types, or anyone who’s ever wondered how things work. (  )1  cmc | Apr 25, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0393059979, Hardcover)We are surrounded by the hardware of the modern world, but how much of it do we even notice, much less understand? This unique and fascinating book covers the parts of the landscape that are often overlooked despite their ubiquity--objects such as utility poles, power lines, cell phone towers, highway overpasses, railroad tracks, factories, and other man-made mechanical marvels. And they are not just in urban areas, but include out of the way "ecosystems" such as mines, dams, wind farms, power plants, grain operators, steel mills, and oil refineries. In Infrastructure, Brian Hayes offers clear explanations of the systems that keep the modern world running, including agriculture, energy supplies, shipping, air transportation, and the various ingenious methods of recycling and managing the waste we generate.Subtitled "A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape," the book is laid out like a nature guide, with comprehensive details and photographs on every page. "There can be just as much of interest happening on a factory rooftop as there is in the forest canopy, just as much to marvel at in the operation of a strip-mining dragline as in the geological carving of a river canyon," writes Hayes. A mine may not be as scenic as a mountain peak, but he argues it can hold as much fascination. His "chief aim is simply to describe and explain the technological fabric of society, not to judge whether it is good or bad, beautiful or ugly." In this he does an impressive job. He tells us how things work and why they are located where they are, and answers dozens of practical questions in the process. He also walks us through how raw materials such as coal, timber, petroleum, and water are converted and transported for use in our homes and businesses. Readers won't view the industrial landscape that same way after poring over this remarkable book. --Shawn Carkonen (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:09 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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