The Works (review: 4/5)

Over the past couple weeks I’ve been flipping through Kate Ascher’s book The Works. Ascher’s expos?© draws on her experience with the Port Authority and with the NYC Economic Development Corporation. The result is a very cool macro- and micro-scopic view of the city that never sleeps. The book is decorated with all sorts of diagrams, labels, charts, cut-aways, and nice commentary. You can see everything from historic street lights, to analyses of pedestrian crosswalks, to the complex networks for planes, trains, and automobiles (and boats and subways and everything else).
The folks at 37 Signals mentioned an aspect of Edward Tufte’s new book, Beautiful Evidence that they appreciated: the “self-imposed constraint”. With that observation in mind, I noticed the same thing in Ascher’s work. Each page is like a self-contained essay on its unique topic. Instead of trailing off onto the next page, each spread is complete and self-contained on its own. You can pick it up anywhere and learn something. This book reminds me of those wonderful books like the Eyewitness Books series I used to devour when I was younger. If I had a coffee table, well, that would be a good place for it: out in the open, always offering another little moment of fascination.