The Works: Anatomy of a City

By Kate Ascher

Book Overview

A fascinating guided tour of the ways things work in a modern city

"It's a rare person who won't find something of interest in The Works, whether it's an explanation of how a street-sweeper works or the view of what's down a manhole." --New York Post

Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? What the pipes under city streets do? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Why radiators in apartment buildings clang? Using New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes readers down manholes and behind the scenes to explain exactly how an urban infrastructure operates. Deftly weaving text and graphics, author Kate Ascher explores the systems that manage water, traffic, sewage and garbage, subways, electricity, mail, and much more. Full of fascinating facts and anecdotes, The Works gives readers a unique glimpse at what lies behind and beneath urban life in the twenty-first century.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143112708
• ISBN13: 9780143112709
• Release Date: August 1970
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.5" x 10.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

Ultimate coffee table/nightstand/waiting room book

Induldge your inner nerd and buy this book. The sections are well laid out with excellent and clear graphics and the sections are small enough that you (or your visitors) can either take one bite at a time or just browse through the thing till you find something that interests you (and you will). Describes detail in a way that's accessable to everyone and without getting tedious. My wait at the dentist's office would fly by with something like this to while away the time.

Spectacular!

As a designer in the New York metropolitan area, I thoroughly appreciate the effort that must have gone into making this book, and in particular its illustrations. They are detailed, accurate (as far as I can tell), and above all informative in a way that infrastructure diagrams from other books are not. It is noted that TW:AOAC's lead designer found inspiration in a chance encounter with famed statistician/graphic artist Edward Tufte - a credible claim, if this book is any indicator. Conveying so much about the city yet basking in white space, these spreads are consistently excellent. Ascher's writing, too, is impeccable, and while a free-market standpoint is appropriately engaged in her commentary, the invaluabity of New York's public bureaus is not given short shrift. Indeed, where politics have clouded issues of development for the city, Ms. Ascher has deftly surmised the issue and given it full and fair treatment. As a major in economics and a professional graphic designer, I am happily forced to recommend this book.

Excellent Reference - Incredible Graphics

I am a licensed professional civil engineer that worked for the Philadelphia Water Department for 10 years and I found this book to be an excellent piece of work. This book would be a great reference for anyone ranging from a high school student to an engineer/architech/planner. The book focuses on New York City so people from the northeast USA may find some of the topics hit close to home. However, the principles and diagrams in the book apply to most cities. One of the best book I've bought in a while!

learn how it all works--with diagrams!

This book has not left the coffee table. Everyone who has come over picks it up and inevitably remarks, "Oh, so that's how it works! I always wondered how they timed the traffic lights" or some such comment. This is a book you can return to again and again--one day it's telecommunications, the next, sewage. It contains so many answers to questions you never knew you had. After reading "The Works," I now walk around New York with a completely different awareness of the incredible infrastructure that quietly undergirds the city: I constantly notice the design of fire hydrants, street signs, and man holes; I know what a "sidewalk neckdown" is; I understand how my water gets to me from the Ashokan Reservoir in the Catskills through those crazy aqueducts (and they ARE crazy! they have a submersible submarine that perouses that thing for leaks!). This book is a perfect gift for any man/boy/girl/hippo who likes to know how things work and likes to see them diagrammed in beautiful, scrumptious illustrations. I am one of these people. But perhaps most importantly, this book made me forgive those terrible yellow trash trains that pull into subway stations late at night and immediately mean you will be waiting twenty more minutes for your train. I used to fear them. Now I know what they do. I forgive you, yellow trash trains.