P8312780, by nate_marsh.

I read a fantastic book earlier this year about something I had no idea I would enjoy so much – a complete page turner that I really could not be separated from for long. This book was called: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape. The central point of this book (in my mind) is that we everyday stumble through a complex landscape representing the pinnacle of human engineering, yet we rarely make an effort to understand even the basics of how it all fits together to make up the infrastructure that nearly all of us encounter.

This book doesn’t bash you over the head with superstructures and this complex web, instead it feeds you the different pieces and gives you the tools to better understand how the world seemingly hums along. The book is by no means exhaustive and the author goes to pains to point out that everything he discusses is immensely more complicated. The reason this book is so amazing is the authors ability to break complex systems into interesting pieces. The icing on the cake is that the author has included thousands of his beautiful photos of whatever he is talking about. Much of the greatest photos are of stuff that, post-9/11, would be nearly impossible to access, let along snap some shot. Seriously, this book is nearly perfect in what it provides – my old man even uses it in one of the classes he teaches!

In celebration – I made an infrastructure flickr set of some shots I enjoy, maybe you will too!