Precious Metal: German Steel, Modernity, and Ecology

With its incorporation into architecture on a grand scale during the long nineteenth century, steel forever changed the way we perceive and inhabit buildings. In this book, Peter H. Christensen shows that even as architects and engineers were harnessing steel’s incredible properties, steel itself was busy transforming the natural world.

Precious Metal explores this quintessentially modernist material—not for the heroic structural innovations it facilitated but for a deeper understanding of t...