What happens when a brilliant architect decides to construct a book rather than a building? You get Reveal: Studio Gang Architects by Jeanne Gang (Princeton Architectural Press, $45), an idiosyncratic collection of dazzling images and insightful text that shows the hidden influences behind eight of her firm’s projects—including the Ford Calumet Environmental Center, slated for construction at Torrence Avenue and 134th Street. In the process of “rendering the invisible visible” (as Mohsen Mostafavi, the dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, writes in the foreword), Gang and her colleagues also discuss the migratory pattern of birds, muse on the 15,000-year history of a Chicago boulder, and demonstrate that the serendipitous pleasures of exploring a three-dimensional book can still trump the practical advantages of trolling its digital counterpart.

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Photography: (book and interior) Reveal: Studio Gang Architects, Princeton Architectural Press, 2011