NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {I} n the past two weeks, I’ve seen enough dump trucks, backhoes, concrete saws, and paving machines to satisfy even the most demanding five-year-old boy. Part of my apartment complex is still under construction, and I’ve been treated to all the sights, sounds, and smells that come with making a space livable. While it has been distracting at times (and concrete saws prove that there is indeed something more annoying than the sound of a chainsaw), watching the various layers come together in the building process has been fascinating. How do you construct a proper drainage pit? I don’t know all the details, but I can assure you it involves a large hole and many loads of dirt, gravel, and rock, all piled in a specific order. Watching the proceedings brought to mind the work of world-class author and illustrator David Macaulay, whose creative, insightful, and highly detailed books such as City and Cathedral were a source of wonder for me.

Macaulay, a British-born American, was captivated by the inner workings of the world from an early age. He would spend hours studying and then sketching various objects, trying to understand how they were constructed. This interest led him to study architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, and he has pursued jobs in numerous design- and teaching-related areas.

Cathedral was Macaulay’s first book, and it follows the building process of a fictional medieval cathedral from the ground up. This popular book was eventually turned into a PBS show that Macaulay helped to narrate. He followed up the success of this book with others, such as City (which, though this Amazon ad is clever, shows that Rome was not built in a day), Mill, Castle, and Mosque. The images and layout of the books display a masterly use of space, illustrating how to scale down and bring to life something so complex. Just like the drainage pit in my backyard, it’s all about layers, and to better appreciate the whole, Macaulay urges us to see the parts.

These eye-opening books aren’t Macaulay’s only publications, however, and at a recent garage sale, I picked up a 1998 edition of his impressive visual-dictionary-type tome, The New Way Things Work. This was the updated and expanded version of his 1988 book of (nearly) the same title. It contains explanations and drawings of everything from can-openers to microphones to the aqualung, and never did I imagine it would be so interesting to read about the design behind nail clippers. An enormous amount of care was put into this work (in all of its editions and updates), from the concept to the descriptions to the explanatory pictures. Macaulay even includes a funny woolly mammoth character whom he uses to both catch our interest and explain the purpose and workings of various objects. What sets it apart from other such books, though, is how he approaches the explanation of each item:

To any machine, work is a matter of principle, because everything a machine does is in accordance with a set of principles or scientific laws. To see the way a machine works, you can take the covers off and look inside. But to understand what goes on, you need to get to know the principles that govern its actions. The machines in this and the following parts of The New Way Things Work are therefore grouped by their principles rather than by their uses. This produces some interesting neighbors. . . . They may look different, be vastly different in scale, and have different purposes, but when seen in terms of principles, they work the same way.

All of these books are wonderful testaments to this author’s unique way of seeing the world, but my favorite is his picture book Angelo. Sweet and simple, this story follows Angelo, a plasterer working to restore the façade of an Italian church, who rescues and befriends a pigeon. While it’s primarily a story of friendship, it is also a tiny lesson in restoration work and in dedication to one’s craft. It’s a warm book, both in tone and color, and full of quirky (a hospital-bed rig for a pigeon) and interesting (the scaffolding covering the church’s front) illustrations.

Unlike many of the other authors I cover in this column, Macaulay is still alive, and he’s currently sharing his love of design with eager young students at Dartmouth College. Even if we can’t attend one of his classes, it is a joy to know that he’s given us such a gift in all his books, and we are indebted to him for helping us see the intricacies of our incredible world with new and wondering eyes.