THE ILLUSTRATED ATLAS OF ARCHITECTURE AND MARVELOUS MONUMENTS

From France, an elegantly designed atlas of world architecture, illustrated exclusively with drawings and packed with useful facts about a large selection of around 36 noteworthy monuments from each of six continents.

Each continent is illustrated with a large map showing numbered thumbnail images of the buildings and a panel with key facts about the region: number of countries, population size and density, percentage of the world’s population, surface area, and climate. The buildings featured are fairly evenly divided between striking contemporary architecture (London’s Gherkin and Shard, Malaysia’s Petronas Towers, Quito’s UNASUR headquarters—“180 feet of cantilevers”!) and religious and political structures (the Taj Mahal, the Blue Mosque, the Caribbean Center of Slavery and the Slave Trade, Romania’s Palace of the Parliament—the “second largest administrative building in the world,” covering 1,280 acres). Each spread offers a dozen or so panels, each illustrating a building and containing key statistics including "did you know?"–type facts; the architect’s name; location, size, height, quantity of material, special features, and years of construction. The endpapers show some of the buildings in relative scale. The order of presentation begins the tour in Europe and concludes in South America, and the diversity of building styles and types should open the most jingoistic eyes.

A well-designed compendium of information about world architecture, if a mite formal.