Magazine

Geoff Manaugh loves fantastical cities. To him, a city might be composed of underground escape tunnels for British Parliament, ancient ruins buried by sand and moss, hillocks on Mars, or building designs generated by a computer using spam as inputs.

The Dwell editor has turned his popular blog, BLDGBLOG, into a book. The longer form allows for longer musings about Albert Einstein’s ashes and extra-orbital weather control, as well as more beautifully reproduced images of things such as the constantly migrating channel of the Mississippi River on Army Corps of Engineers maps and underground sewage systems by photographer Michael Cook. A third of the time I have no idea what Manaugh is talking about, but his infectious enthusiasm for the obscure is precisely the allure of the blog and the book.