Includes bibliographical references and index.

Life with less energy -- Farming, the city and monumental architecture -- Us and them -- Energy booms -- A proportional indicator of power -- Plague and prosperity -- The march of bricks and mortar -- That which all the world desires -- Form follows fuel -- The beauty of speed -- Too cheap to meter -- Today's great energy revolution

The story of architecture is the story of humanity. The buildings we live in, from the humblest prehistory huts to today's skyscrapers, reveal our priorities and ambitions, our family structures and power structures. And to an extent never explored until now, architecture has been shaped in every era by our access to energy, from fire to farming to fossil fuels. In this ground-breaking history of world architecture, Barnabas Calder takes us on a dazzling tour of some of the most astonishing buildings of the past fifteen thousand years, from Uruk, via Ancient Rome and Victorian Liverpool, to China's booming megacities. He reveals how every building - from the Parthenon to the Great Mosque of Damascus to a typical Georgian house - was influenced by the energy available to it architects and why this matters. Today, architecture consumes so much energy that 40 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from the construction and running of buildings. If we are to avoid catastrophic climate change then now, more than ever, we need beautiful but also intelligent architecture, and to retrofit - not demolish - the buildings we already have.

UCC Fund.