The Works
When I was in college at Berkeley I remember hearing these guys (I’m sure they were in the engineering school) talk about how they had snuck into a BART tunnel and set up a table and ate a meal there in the tunnel, clearing out before a train came along.
I was reminded of them when I picked up a copy of a book called The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher (2005).
It’s an infrastructure nerd’s dream-come-true. It takes New York City as a model for explaining how traffic, communications, power, water and freight move through a city. For those of us living in New York, the book helps us understand so many of the inscrutable signs, symbols and objects we see as we walk, drive or subway along.
It does so with a minimum of text and an abundance of very nifty color illustrations, like for example, a timeline of street lamp designs, with the lamps silhouetted. Or, those street repair notes, drawn on the pavement in spray paint by repair crews. Or, an illustration of the underside of a street sweeping truck (a view I’d never like to see, except as an illutration in a book, BTW).
There’s a great page illustrating the most common types of trees in the five boroughs. How about what the most common subway system traffic light signals mean? You’ve got it here.
If you’re looking for a blueprint to help you set up a three-course meal in a subway tunnel, you probably won’t find it here (in any case, I want my three-course meals in a restaurant, not a tunnel). But if you’re looking for a book to help you understand the many things we walk around, over and through that help a city function, this is the book.
