Big Shed

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.