An award-winning architect explores the history and engineering of a modern marvel with “easygoing prose [and] dozens of delightfully accessible sketches” (SFGate.com). Nine million people visit the Golden Gate Bridge each year, yet how many know why it’s painted that stunning shade of “international orange”? Or that ancient Mayan and Art Deco buildings influenced the design? Current bridge architect Donald MacDonald answers these questions and others in a friendly, informative look at the bridge’s engineering and seventy-year history. This accessible account is accompanied by seventy of MacDonald’s own charming color illustrations, making it easy to understand how the bridge was designed and constructed. A fascinating study for those interested in architecture, design, or anyone with a soft spot for San Francisco, Golden Gate Bridge is a fitting tribute to this timeless icon.

The Golden Gate Bridge is a marvel of engineering and architecture considered by many to be one of the world’s most beautiful bridges, its picturesque vistas favored by photographers, artists, visitors to San Francisco, and almost everyone else. When naysayers said it couldn’t be built, Joseph Strauss and a team of visionaries spun 80,000 miles of wire and riveted nearly 900,000 tons of steel into gossamer wings, spanning for the first time an immense gulf and linking the Pacific coast. In black-and-white photography, Historic Photos of the Golden Gate Bridge details the history of the bridge from its design and construction to recent times. Nearly 200 rarely seen images offer a compelling look at the bridge, from the days when the treacherous currents of the Golden Gate could be crossed only by boat to the rise of the bridge as a national landmark. This book is sure to delight both those who dream of the impossible and those who live to make it happen.

Guess how many vehicles drive across the Golden Gate Bridge each year?

Silver Award Winner, 2016 Nautilus Book Award in Young Adult (YA) Non-Fiction Moving beyond the familiar accounts of politics and the achievements of celebrity engineers and designers, Building the Golden Gate Bridge is the first book to primarily feature the voices of the workers themselves. This is the story of survivors who vividly recall the hardships, hazards, and victories of constructing the landmark span during the Great Depression. Labor historian Harvey Schwartz has compiled oral histories of nine workers who helped build the celebrated bridge. Their powerful recollections chronicle the technical details of construction, the grueling physical conditions they endured, the small pleasures they enjoyed, and the gruesome accidents some workers suffered. The result is an evocation of working-class life and culture in a bygone era. Most of the bridge builders were men of European descent, many of them the sons of immigrants. Schwartz also interviewed women: two nurses who cared for the injured and tolerated their antics, the wife of one 1930s builder, and an African American ironworker who toiled on the bridge in later years. These powerful stories are accompanied by stunning photographs of the bridge under construction. An homage to both the American worker and the quintessential San Francisco landmark, Building the Golden Gate Bridge expands our understanding of Depression-era labor and California history and makes a unique contribution to the literature of this iconic span.

A passionate chronicle of the Golden Gate Bridge's construction by a National Humanities Medal-winning historian reveals influences from culture and nature that shaped its development while offering insight into its role as a national symbol of American engineering and innovation.

The 1950s, 60s, and 70s were defining moments in our nation's history, and San Francisco was at the forefront of the avant-garde artistic, intellectual, and cultural movements of the time. San Francisco gave rise to the most significant countercultural revolutions of the century, including the Beatniks of the 1950s, the hippies in the 1960s, and the gay rights movement in the 1970s. This volume, Historic Photos of San Francisco in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, captures the revolutionary and tumultuous spirit of these historic times in stunning black-and-white photography. The book provides a retrospective view of ordinary citizens enjoying their daily lives in an extraordinary city, and illustrates the participants, protests, riots, triumphs, and tragedies of this extraordinary period in San Francisco and American history.

"The photographs in this book were made between 1997 and 2002 from the front porch of my house in the Berkeley Hills; this special oversized edition presents a selection of forty key images from this series, and was created to commemorate the seventy-fiith anniversary of the 1937 construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, Richard Misrach"--Colophon.