This Atlas of 20th Century Architecture Weighs As Much As a Spare Tire

It seems silly to characterize 20th Century World Architecture: The Phaidon Atlas as concise, since it profiles 750 buildings and weighs almost 17 pounds. But for the busiest hundred years of human history, that’s a remarkable exercise in refinement: one building per continent, per year.

Everyone likes to argue over best-of lists. But the admirable quality of Phaidon's hefty new offering, and this is not to demean the efforts of the 150 specialists who helped narrow down the selection, is not that it picks the winners correctly, but that it picks at all. The Atlas boxes in a century’s worth of building design. (The book also comes with a carrying box, to make transport less cumbersome.) That effort alone is worth celebrating; as it turns out, the results are as well.