Customer Reviews

Skyscrapers: The New Millennium (Architecture)

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This is a perfect book for the coffee table. It has a nice mix of Architecture from around the world with quite a mix of building sizes and shapes. It is more global than expected and that is a plus. Anyone looking for significant design details may be disappointed. Skyscaper afficinados will wish for more depth. A good reference guide.

68 mostly built projects are depicted in this sizable survey mostly by excellent, large photos, but also by renderings, plans, models, sketches, site plans, details, sections, hard line presentation drawings, etc., but not more tech. drawings than one or two small ones per project. Interestingly, the SEG Apartment Tower presented on pp. 88-89 has a design of its one side found latter in all four sides of the Freedom Tower by David Childs.

After seeing the exhibit by the same name at the Art Institute of Chicago, I found the book to have some disappointments: many of the exhibits from the museum were not mentioned in the book, some of the book's pictures were poorly reproduced (probably photographed from the exhibit's panels or enlarged from 35-mm slides), and some of the projects weren't discussed as in-depth as the museum exhibit. I got the feeling that this book was written not as an exhibit guide (even though the Art Institute of Chicago advertised it is the companion book to the exhibit by the same name), but as a stand-alone book about a few noteworthy projects.