This book presents a terrestrial description of the Seagram Building. It doing so, it aims to describe how humans and nature interact with the thin crust of the planet through architecture. Architecture reorganizes nature and society in particular ways that today demand overt attention and new methods of description. In particular, the immense material, energy and labor involved in building require a fresh interpretation that better situates the ecological and social potential of design. The book mixes construction ecology, material geography, and world-systems analysys through architecture to help articulate all the terrestrial activities that engender building generally, and more specifically through the example of a most modern of modern architectures: the Seagram Building.