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• W4376543756 abstract "196 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE for instance, that ofthe Palmolive Building on page 139, the Brunswick Building on page 195, and the Onterie Center on page 269. Architects and their firms are well documented, but engineers and contractors unfortunately are not. The history is not presented entirely as a chronology, but the material is organized in an encyclopedic approach, a point-by-point and monument-by-monument discussion. Neither the internalist technology nor the generalist social construc­ tion is a prominent topic. Nevertheless, the useful information the book contains outweighs disappointments the specialist may feel. The book hints at more than it presents, and it presents material from which the specialist can make connections, derive questions, or perhaps distill concepts. The inspirational value of this material may well be its chief attraction to historians of technology and their students, aside, of course, from the beauty of the layout and images that we have come to expect from Rizzoli, which make it a joy to read. Tom F. Peters Dr. Peters is professor of the history of building technology and architectural technology as well as director of the Institute for the Study of the Highrise Habitat at Lehigh University. He is the author of many studies on building history and culture. Skyscraper: The Making ofa Building. By Karl Sabbagh. New York: Viking Pfenguin, 1989. Pp. x + 388; illustrations, index. $22.95. In 1990, WGBH Boston and Channel Four London presented a five-hour Public Broadcasting Service television documentary, “Sky­ scraper.” It was designed to introduce a lay audience to the intricate procedure of putting up a tall, modern building, in this case World­ wide Plaza on Manhattan’s West Side, a district also known as Hell’s Kitchen or Clinton. Now we have the book, authored by Karl Sabbagh. What happens when a series of images and spoken narra­ tives is transferred to the printed page? The transition is a difficult one—in part because Sabbagh is attempting to do two things at once: to provide nonprofessionals with a basic grammar of construction (and his book does contain a large number of useful simple drawings and diagrams, in addition to twenty-four full-color plates) and to tell a good dramatic story. Where, we might ask, is the drama in a chronicle of a single tall building? In terms of aesthetic beauty or technological breakthrough, there is absolutely nothing outstanding about Worldwide Plaza. It is a bulky office building forty-seven stories (770 feet) high and 1.6 million square feet, with a price tag of $550 million. As one of the contractors put it concerning the geometry that controls the cost of this type of building: “short fat is a helluva lot cheaper than tall skinny” (p. 33). The author himselfjustifies all the attention given to TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 197 such an ordinary building by saying, “The book is about visions. . . . It is about the faith that led thousands of people to work toward a goaf” But surely what propels those thousands is most often not a vision or a goal but hundreds of small, self-serving, money-making consid­ erations, held in check at crucial points by tough building codes and the stubborn professionalism of a construction supervisor as well as a surprisingly large number of contractors. That is Sabbagh’s story. The book is a documentary, not fiction, but Skyscraper in its genre nevertheless resembles a detective novel. The central event is already accomplished before the story begins (in this case a building and not a murder); we know that Worldwide Plaza is now standing. So the task of the narrator is to re-create the event with as much excitement as possible, to maintain readers’ interest by adding suspense or withholding information. Sabbagh builds his “plot” through four strategies. First, there is the problem of money and of meeting schedules. Con­ nected with time and money is a second suspense builder: corruption. Sabbagh gives us a tense and entertainingchapter on stone and marble, with extortions and racketeering convictions that make the front page of the New York Times. As a third story-building device, Sabbagh interweaves largely tech­ nical descriptions with capsules of human..." @default.
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• W4376543756 date "1992-01-01" @default.
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• W4376543756 title "Skyscraper: The Making of a Building by Karl Sabbagh" @default.
• W4376543756 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.1992.0185" @default.
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