I suppose I should puff my own books, since it's my site and I can get away with it. Right then: the bestselling
Contemporary World Architecture by Hugh Pearman
(Phaidon, £35/$50, 512 pages, hundreds of photos and drawings, now available also in French, German and Chinese) is mandatory. Good deals available on Amazon.
The Architecture of Eden (Hugh Pearman and Andrew Whalley, Transworld, £35/$50, 129 pages)
, recently published, is essentially a beautiful picture book on Sir Nicholas Grimshaw's famous Eden Project in Cornwall: but topped and tailed with essays by the authors on the nature of the modern and historic glasshouse. 
Those with a fascination for engineering could do worse than buy
30 Bridges (Matthew Wells with introduction by Hugh Pearman, Laurence King, £35/$50)
. Wells, a leading young structural engineer, picks an eclectic crop of bridges and explains what each is doing. As well as the 30 bridges of the title, Wells gives us an admirably clear and concise history of bridge design.
