Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America
By Eric Larson (Crown, 2004)
Combining the story of the design and construction of the seminal 1893 Chicago World Exposition with an actual murder mystery of the same era, this page-turner is a must for design history buffs. If you work on complex projects, you’ll be surprised how little has changed in the world of new ideas, approvals, bureaucracies and deadlines. You won’t believe what bridge engineer George Ferris had to go through to get his innovative, but at the time, scary and unfamiliar giant wheel approved and built.