The Cannibal's Cookbook - by Brandon Clifford (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Cannibal's Cookbook fiercely consumes the body of past cyclopean constructions. It assembles, re-packages, and offers this latent knowledge for your contemporary consumption. It is a manual for the hungry, for those who are not satiated by the careless building practices of the present.

With one foot in the past and another in the present, the cookbook bridges the realities of our ancestors and ourselves. We propose a series of architectural "recipes" after dining on this body of past expertise. The recipes are deciphered from ancient cyclopean masonry systems, but with a contemporary twist. They cannibalize leftover debris--building rubble that typically stuffs our landfills--to construct new buildings

Review Quotes

"Clifford's algorithms provide something akin to recipes, with prescriptive techniques and methods that show builders how to turn a pile of rubble into a wall." -- Katharine Schwab, FastCo

"This concise and compact publication makes the misunderstood and "mysterious" process of megalithic building easily comprehensible.

The graphics alone are a must for teaching a course on archaeological and modern construction.

It is a relief not only to see the archaeological information well presented but also made relevant for our modern world.

This innovative book is well worth it merely for the quality of its graphics." -- Alexei Vranich PhD, Archaeologist, University of Texas San Antonio

"The book is a true bombshell, fearlessly exploding the world of architecture; by getting rid of contemporary times, defined as a self-destructive, mad delirium, Clifford takes us back to what Bruno Zevi called, 'the Zero Mark, ' a primigenial architecture - eternal and mythical in its construction processes - that, in this case, is projected into the future." -- Riccardo Buratti, Domus