With sketchbook in hand, Macaulay scrambles up, over, around, and through spectacular structures, explaining the secrets that allow them to span great chasms, hold back gigantic lakes, reach to the sky, and otherwise appear to defy natural limits. Through the sagas of the Brooklyn, Golden Gate, and other great spans, Macaulay shows how engineers have conquered ever-wider chasms with better construction materials and innovative designs. When the Roman Emperor Hadrian rebuilt the Pantheon, a temple to all the gods, he chose the dome as uniquely symbolic, impressive, and complex. Little did he realize he had created an enduring role for the dome as a symbol of human achievement that would cover the largest gatherings of people, whether at prayer services or football games. Macaulay explores the tricky technology of domes, right up to the geodesic marvels of Buckminster Fuller and beyond.
Plans are in the works for even taller buildings.
The program looks at the quest to build high, from the medieval towers of Italy's San Gimignano to today's dueling skyscrapers. Macaulay also investigates the remarkable achievements of the Gothic cathedral builders and the near-disaster of New York's Citigroup Center, which needed an emergency repair to keep it from toppling over due to a change in construction specifications. Big dams store water, prevent floods, and generate electricity, but they also can displace large numbers of people and wreak havoc on the environment. Macaulay explores the engineering challenges and social consequences of big dams, from Hoover's concrete arch confronting the Colorado River to the Aswan High Dam, a veritable underwater mountain sitting on the Nile riverbed, holding back a lake the size of England. Macaulay probes these and other questions, while highlighting the risky job of those who do the digging, from slaves chipping away at rock to make way for ancient Roman waterworks to heavy equipment operators on today's Big Dig beneath Boston.