Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

An exploration of contemporary architecture's decision to 'think big', this book will inform and inspire architects, engineers and anyone who wonders at these extraordinary structures.

Exhibition halls and sports arenas, factories and warehouses, airports and railway stations, arts centres and concert halls: big sheds are all around us yet the story behind their extraordinary growth has gone untold.

Beginning with the roots of the big shed - including 19th-century iron structures, the work of Buckminster Fuller, Archigram, and the Pompidou and Sainsbury Centres - the book is organized by function: exhibitions, industry, transport, sports and arts. Together these areas account for the best examples of big sheds over the past twenty years, and include work by Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Jean Nouvel, Daniel Libeskind, Nicholas Grimshaw and Toyo Ito, among many others.

From the vertiginous daring of Tokyo International Forum to Madrid's award-winning Barajas Airport, these structures have changed the very nature of architecture. Throughout the book Pryce's dramatic photography captures the buildings' primal vastness, while technical drawings help explain how they were designed, built and function.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

As with his 2005 book, Buildings in Wood, freelance photographer Pryce brings to his latest architectural survey a distinctive perspective well grounded in architectural theory and practice. The "big shed" is essentially a vast enclosed space with minimal interior supports that allows for maximum adaptability for current and future needs. Pryce proposes that structures as diverse as airports, art museums, and stadiums have evolved over the last century and a half by utilizing the shed paradigm, albeit with widely divergent building techniques and aesthetic aspirations. Richard Rogers's Millennium Dome (London) and Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles) are among the 36 cutting-edge projects by today's high-profile firms that Pryce has chosen to exemplify the "big shed." Often surveys like this consist of little more than captioned illustrations. In contrast, alongside 200-plus of his own glorious (mostly color) photos, Pryce's insightful text provides background and support to his "big shed" thesis. Chapters devoted to function-e.g., sport, industry, and transport-incorporate in-depth critiques of each project. Highly recommended for professional, academic, and large public libraries.-David Soltesz, Cuyahoga Cty. P.L., Parma, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.