How buildings work

What do buildings do, and how do they fuction? Edward Allen's new book provides a full and elegantly articulated answer to these fundamental questions about architecture. "A house of snow in the Arctic obeys the same physical laws as one of bamboo in the tropics," writes Allen, "and a steel-framed skyscraper is not so far removed from a tree house as we would sometimes believe." But the principles involved in the functioning of buildings has never been clearly laid out in one place. Edward Allen's book is the first comprehensive, nonmathmematical physiology of architecture, and will enable…