"Infrastructure" Reveals and Celebrates the Often Unnoticed Engineered Environment |
January 22, 2006 |
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Posted by Don Dunnington at January 22, 2006 03:56 PM |
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With "Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape," Brian Hayes brings to public attention the essential underpinnings of the modern world. Like the air we breathe, and the water we drink, the technological structures Hayes documents in "Infrastructure" are easily taken for granted. Yet without these engineered structures and transports, civil life as we know it could not be sustained.
The the story of water, from the water we drink, to the water we flush, can be found in "Waterworks," the second chapter of this field guide to the industrial wilds. The guide takes us to places often set in remote locales, surrounded by chain link fences. We go inside plants filled with mysterious machines that few non-engineers could comprehend without this expert guide to show where to look and explain what we’re seeing. Hayes helps us see the beauty and art in the common and unglamorous, such as the sludge digesters in Deer Island, MA.
Hayes spent 12 years crossing America, photographing and gathering the stories of our industrial landscape. The book contains more than 700 hundred photos, taken from afar--from the air and from the roadside--and close up and inside the structures and machines built to work so well that we seldom give them a thought. Hayes compliments his pictures with a narrative that helps the reader appreciate both the industrial history and the engineering behind the visual revelations his camera sets before us.
Hayes received support for his project from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which helps fund efforts to promote public understanding of technology. A senior writer for American Scientist, Hayes talks about his book in an interview at American Scientist Online. In the interview, he says he grew up in the era of Sputnik and expected to become a scientist or engineer. But "somewhere along the way," he says, "I neglected to collect a university education, or even a high school diploma. Lacking those credentials, I found it a good deal easier to get a job as a writer…" After a brief period working as a news writer, he joined Scientific American, "a splendid place to learn both science and writing," he says.
Hayes takes us on a grand tour of our dams, mines, power plants, refineries, waterworks, highways, railways, electrical grids, waste and recycling facilities, shipping, aviation, bridges, tunnels and communication systems. It’s great introduction for the uninitiated into the engineered world, and for the engineers who build and maintain them, it’s a long overdue acknowledgment of the works they create and sustain.
Infrastructure:
A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape
By Brian Hayes
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
536 pages, $49.95 ($32.97 on Amazon)
Don Dunnington
Comments
It sounds like an interesting book--I think some of America's most fascinating architecture can be found in its industrial landscape. Really, one only needs to take a walk through New York City to see how stunning its old (and now converted) warehouses now appear. Of course, I'm bit of a architecture/photography buff; does the book appeal to more scientific-minded engineers, as well?
Posted by: Jarad, from ThomasNet at January 23, 2006 01:56 PM
Jarad,
Good question. It's not a science book, and I'm neither a scientist or an engineer, so I can't speak for the "more scientific-minded engineers." The author does get into some of the science behind various processes. One of the best examples is a sidebar on page 160, "Sweet-and-Sour Hydrocarbon Soup." While the science described (and diagramed) here won't be news to anyone with the most elementary education in organic chemistry, it is a great lesson for any engineer or scientist in how to present technical information in way that can capture the interest, and understanding, of the non-technical reader.
Don Dunnington
Posted by: Don Dunnington at January 30, 2006 10:35 AM
Hi. I'm Brian Hayes, the author of "Infrastructure." I appreciate your interest in the book. I just wanted to leave this note to say that the book has its own web site, http://industrial-landscape.com, where you'll find more information, a couple of complete chapters in the form of PDF files, a gallery of photos, links to reviews, a forum for reader comments, etc. Enjoy!
Posted by: Brian Hayes at March 8, 2006 08:19 PM
