Norman Foster, architect of Chek Lap Kok Airport terminal, has said he intended the 1.4-kilometre building to look from the air like a dragon or a ray fish with its tail over the water.
Sadly, neither Foster's Lantau creation, nor his more well-known Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in Central, are featured in Eco-tech: Sustainable Architecture and High Technology (Thames and Hudson, $500), perhaps because the airport was not finished when the book was produced and the bank was not considered 'sustainable'.
Author Catherine Slessor, deputy editor of the UK magazine Architectural Review, claims to have gathered 40 of the world's 'most sophisticated projects', highlighting architecture incorporating magnificent technology but also what the book calls 'environmentally intelligent' features. Foster's Stansted Airport in Britain, his predecessor to Chek Lap Kok, is included.
The only Asian examples come from Japan, including the Kansai International Airport whose passenger boarding wing is pictured above: a single 1.7 km building lauded for its use of natural light and its structural lightness.
The pyramids of Egypt are rather older and heavier, more mysterious, and of constant interest since their construction 45 centuries ago. Interest in them has increased recently with tales of how King Tutankhamun might have raided his brother's tomb before he himself was murdered.
The Complete Pyramids (Thames and Hudson, $420) by Mark Lehner, a US-based researcher into Egyptian archaeology, is an interesting and well-illustrated book, with diagrams and photos, that explain all about them in the allegedly 'first fully illustrated compendium of every major pyramid of ancient Egypt'.