From Egypt and Classical Greece and Rome through the building booms of the Gothic era and the Renaissance, and from the Industrial Revolution to the present era of digital modeling, Building: 3,000 Years of Design, Engineering, and Construction, charts centuries of innovations in engineering and building construction. This comprehensive and heavily illustrated volume, aimed at students and young professionals as well as general readers, explores the materials, classic texts, instruments, and theories that have propelled modern engineering, and the famous and not-so-famous buildings designed through the ages, from the Parthenon to Chartres Cathedral and the dome of St. Peter's, from eighteenth-century silk mills in England to the Crystal Palace, and on to the first Chicago high-rises, the Sydney Opera House, and the latest "green" skyscrapers.

The book concentrates on developments since the industrial and scientific revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Incorporated within the continuous narrative are sidebars with short biographies of eminent engineers, excerpts from classic texts, stories of individual projects of major importance, and brief histories of key concepts such as calculus. Also included are extensive reference materials: appendices, a glossary, bibliography, and index.