David Macaulay (born 2 December 1946) is a British-born American illustrator and writer. His most famous works include Cathedral (1973), The Way Things Work (1988) and The New Way Things Work (1998). His illustrations have been featured in popular, nonfiction books combining text and illustrations explaining architecture, design and engineering. He has also written a number of children's fiction books. Macaulay was a 2006 recipient of a MacArthur Fellows Program award and also a recipient of the Caldecott Medal in 1991 for Black and White (1990).
Video David Macaulay
Biography
Born in Burton upon Trent and raised in Lancashire, England, Macaulay's family emigrated to Bloomfield, New Jersey at the age of eleven. He had an early fascination with how machines operated and making models of them, and began drawing illustrations of models while in the United States. After graduating from high school in Cumberland, Rhode Island in 1964, he enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), from which he received a bachelor's degree in architecture but decided after graduating against pursuing a career in architecture. He spent his fifth year at RISD in the European Honors Program, studying in Rome. He then took jobs as an interior designer, a junior high school teacher, and a teacher at RISD before creating books.
Macaulay's books have sold more than three million copies in the U.S., have been translated into a dozen languages, and have been widely praised. Time said of his work, "What [Macaulay] draws, he draws better than any other pen-and-ink illustrator in the world".
Macaulay currently lives in Norwich, Vermont.
Maps David Macaulay
Literature
Macaulay is the author of several books on architecture and design. His first book, Cathedral (1973), was a history, extensively illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings, of the construction of a fictitious but representative Gothic cathedral. This was followed by a series of books of the same type: City (1974), on the construction of Verbonia, a fictitious but typical Roman city; Pyramid (1975), a collection of diagrams and sketches illustrating the construction process of the pyramid monuments to the Egyptian Pharaohs; Castle (1977), on the construction of Aberwyvern castle, a fictitious but typical medieval castle; Mill (1983), on the evolution of New England mills; and Mosque (2003), which depicts the design and construction of an Ottoman-style masjid, motivated by the September 11 attacks to show how the traditions of major religions share more in common than they have dividing them.. Cathedral, City, Pyramid, and Castle were later adapted into documentaries produced by Unicorn Productions, which aired sporadically on PBS from 1983 to 1994. Other books in this series are Underground (1976), which describes the building foundations and support structures (such as water and sewer pipes) that underlie a typical city intersection, and Unbuilding (1980), which describes the hypothetical dismantling of the Empire State Building in preparation for re-erection in the Middle East.
Macaulay is probably best known for the popular children's book The Way Things Work (1988, text by Neil Ardley) which was expanded and re-released as The New Way Things Work (1998) and The Way Things Work Now (2016). The Way Things Work is his most commercially successful series and served as the basis for a short-lived educational television program.
His books often display a whimsical humor. Illustrations in The Way Things Work depict cave people and woolly mammoths operating giant-sized versions of the devices he is explaining. Motel of the Mysteries, written in 1979 following the 1976-1979 exhibition of the Tutankhamun relics in the USA, concerns the discovery by future archaeologists of an American motel and the archaeologists' ingenious interpretation of the motel and its contents as a funerary and temple complex. Baaa is set after the human race has somehow gone extinct. Sheep discover artifacts of lost human civilization and attempt to rebuild it. However, the new sheep-inhabited world develops the same side effects of economic disparity, crime, and war. Macaulay considers the trend of technology's movements towards further degrees of concealment of machinery's inner workings as a detriment to society, and he considers his work motivated to fight against this.
To research his book The Way We Work, Macaulay spent years talking and studying with doctors and researchers, attending medical procedures, and laboriously sketching and drawing. He worked with medical professionals such as Lois Smith (a professor at Harvard University and researcher at Children's Hospital Boston) and medical writer Richard Walker to ensure the accuracy of both his words and his illustrations. Anne Gilroy, clinical anatomist in the departments of surgery and cell biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, consulted on the book, and said of Macaulay, "His remarkable curiosity and meticulous research led him into some of the most complicated facets of the human body yet he tells this story with simplicity, ingenuity and humor."
Other works
A mural designed by Macaulay was painted on Route 95 in Providence, Rhode Island, which depicted statues of famous citizens of Rhode Island, such as Moses Brown and General Ambrose Burnside, alongside an energetic dog who had knocked over one statue while chasing after a pigeon. It was on display from 2013 but later taken down in 2017 due to the Rhode Island Department of Transportation no longer being able to repair it after constant graffiti tagging.
He has collaborated with the Center for Integrated Quantum Materials at Harvard University and the Boston Museum of Science to create illustrations for quantum materials which would aid in explaining visual information to other researchers and a widespread audiences, through establishing a consistent visual style.
Awards
Macaulay's awards include the MacArthur Fellows Program award (2006); the Caldecott Medal, won for his book Black and White; the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award; the Christopher Award, an American Institute of Architects Medal; the Washington Children's Book Guild Nonfiction Award; the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis; the Dutch Silver Slate Pencil Award; and the Bradford Washburn Award, awarded by the Museum of Science in Boston to exemplary contributors to science. He was U.S. nominee for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1984 and 2002. Macaulay was honored with delivering the May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture in 2008 by the American Library Association.
Publications
- Cathedral: The Story of its Construction (1973); winner of the 1975 Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis for children's non-fiction.
- City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction (1974)
- Pyramid (1975)
- Underground (1976)
- Castle (1977)
- Great Moments in Architecture (1978)
- Motel of The Mysteries (1979)
- Unbuilding (1980)
- Help! Let Me Out! (1982, David Lord Porter (Author), David MacAulay (Illustrator))
- Mill (1983)
- Baaa (1985)
- Why the Chicken Crossed the Road (1987)
- The Way Things Work (1988; text by David Macaulay and Neil Ardley
- Black and White (1990)
- Ship (1994)
- Shortcut (1995)
- Rome Antics (1997)
- The New Way Things Work (1998)
- Pinball Science (1998) (CD-ROM video game)
- Building the Book Cathedral (1999)
- Building Big (2000)
- Angelo (2002)
- Mosque (2003)
- The Way We Work (7 October 2008)
- Built to Last (2010)
- Toilet: How It Works
- Eye: How It Works
- Castle: How It Works (2012)
- The Way Things Work Now (2016)
Artwork Exhibtions
- David Macaulay: The Art of Drawing Architecture. The National Building Museum. (June 2007 to May 2008)
- Building Books: The Art of David Macaulay. The Currier Museum of Art. (2009)
References
See also
External links
- "David Macaulay". Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. author details.
- "A shorter biography of David Macaulay". PBS.org. Boston, MA: WGBH.
- "David Macaulay". bio. NCBLA.
- "David Macaulay". Interview. NCBLA.
- "Exhibition". Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum. 2008.
- "Exhibition". Memphis, TN: Dixon Gallery and Gardens. 2008.
- "An illustrated journey through Rome". TED. 2002. David Macaulay at TED
- "David Macaulay: "The Way Things Work Now"". Talks at Google on YouTube. 22 November 2016. Retrieved 9 June 2018.
Source of article : Wikipedia
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