The Song of Stone: From Khufu and Gilgamesh to Sinan, Wright, and Zaha Hadid

Stone was born before humanity had a name, and in this book it carries the narrator through the history of building, from the Pyramid of Khufu, where a king tried to defeat death, to Gilgamesh in Uruk, who could command walls and never time, and to the gardens of Babylon, where longing climbed toward the sky. He climbs the Acropolis in the age of Pericles and Phidias, sits beside a Roman in the Colosseum, sees the Umayyad Mosque rise in al-Walid's Damascus, finds grandeur in humility with Umar ibn al-Khattab in Jerusalem, asks Saladin what remains of victory, and meets Mimar Sinan, the Nasrid walls of the Alhambra and Shah Jahan's grief turned to marble. The modern age arrives with Gropius and his Bauhaus workshop, Le Corbusier and his machine for living, Wright's Fallingwater, brutalist concrete, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, Mies van der Rohe and Robert Venturi's reply that less is a bore, then Daniel Libeskind's wounded lines and the towers of New York. When the schools quarrel in a great square, an unknown worker in a dusty helmet silences them by saying he built some of what they argue about, and a child draws a simple house with a door and a tree. Materials and architectural elements then sing in turn, Time passes over them all, and the stone ends by telling whoever lifts it what it told humanity at the start: build, and never forget why you build.