Ove Arup and Partners: Engineering The Built Environment.

By Degenhard Sommer. Baste, Boston, Berlin: Herbert Stocher and Lutz Weisser. Birkhauser Verlag A. G. 1994. 29.50 [pounds] (SF58, DM68.00).

One can only marvel at the breadth and excellence of the Arup organisation around the world. Without their involvement, many of our greatest buildings would not exist in the form that we know them, and our imaginings of what twentieth-century building can do would have been severely curtailed.

This book, in English and German, tells the story of the firm, and it tells it in a deadpan, matter-of-fact way that somehow emphasises the achievement. The authors are teachers at Vienna Technical University, two of them are architects, but they have managed virtually to ignore Arup Associates and to include the many nonarchitectural facets of Arups. This gives the book an added interest for architects. We already know about Gateway Two and Broadgate, but probably do not know what Arups are up to in test-crashing Rover cars or trains carrying nuclear loads, nor of their expertise in determining railway routes or finding North Sea Gas. The range of activity is as impressive as the quality.

The foreword, by Renzo Piano, is followed by the three main sections of the book and finally a chronology of the firm and a list of 100 key products. The first section, `Philosophy and Company Structure', describes the idealism and humane concerns that have penetrated the firm's activities and have led to the present structure in which it is owned by a partnership of charitable trusts. The second section, `Projects', illustrates and describes 20 recent or current jobs. The final section, 'Experience and Experiments', emphasises the open and co-operative nature of the Arup philosophy and describes some of their research. The authors also write about their hopes for the future.

Those of us who may rely on the help of Arups in putting together and servicing the buildings we design will find this book fascinating and will gain some insight into that wonderful, but often slightly mysterious organisation.