The Fireproof Building: Technology and Public Safety in the Nineteenth-Century City . By Sara Wermiel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. viii, 301. $45.00.
本书探讨了美国从18世纪末到19世纪结构防火技术的发展，特别是其对摩天大楼发展的关键作用，揭示了防火技术如何塑造20世纪城市景观。
Sara Wermiel's carefully crafted and informative The Fireproof Building explores the evolution of structural fire protection in the United States from its origins in the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century with special emphasis on its role in the development of skyscrapers. Without the specialized technological developments described by the author, large public buildings, which are the centerpieces of most contemporary cities, would be impossible. Although many scholars have examined the engineering of tall buildings and their historic conquest of height in the modern city, Wermeil provides a compelling argument for the broad significance of fire-resistant methods in the development of the twentieth-century urban landscape.