Building Big

Written and illustrated

by David Macaulay.

192 pp. Boston:

Walter Lorraine Books/

Houghton Mifflin Company. $30.

(All ages)

When I first moved to New York City many years ago, the Holland Tunnel fascinated me. I grew up mostly in landlocked flyover states, so the mere idea that one could drive under a river was amazing to me. But it also posed the nagging question: How did they build this thing way back in the 1920's, and how could drivers breathe while traveling underwater between New Jersey and Manhattan?

The answer, according to the fascinating ''Building Big,'' is expert engineering, drawing on centuries of tunnel-making history and the implementation of ventilation towers that allowed for airflow into different layers of the tunnel's tubes. The explanation is rendered by David Macaulay, the writer and artist who showed adults and children alike ''The Way Things Work'' in his 1988 gem of the same name, which revealed how things from toilet tanks to nuclear fission functioned.

With ''Building Big,'' Macaulay has created a wonderful book for the real bridge-and-tunnel crowd -- and for those who also appreciate the engineering ingenuity that went into constructing some of the world's most outstanding skyscrapers, dams and domes. The book is the free-standing companion to the PBS television series of the same name broadcast in October.

Here, as in ''The Way Things Work,'' Macaulay combines his detailed yet vaguely whimsical illustrations with simple, straightforward prose that breaks down complex architectural and engineering accomplishments into easily digestible tidbits that don't insult the intelligence of the reader of any age. Many of the notable structures of the past couple of millenniums are dissected and discussed, from the Ponte Fabricio, a bridge built over part of the Tiber in Rome in 62 B.C., to modern marvels like the 1,476-foot Petronas Towers skyscrapers erected in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in the mid-1990's.

''Building Big'' is visually appealing all around. Instead of segregating text and images into separate parts of the page, textbook style, Macaulay combines them into an integrated whole that entertains the eye from page to page with his creative interplay of the elements. For example, the discreet paragraph of text in the corner of a two-page illustration showing how concrete was poured down the sides of the massive It Dam in Brazil helps convey the sheer size of the structure. There's humor, too. A small illustration of a train traveling across the cantilevered bridge that spans Scotland's Firth of Forth contains a single-word caption: ''toot.''

Macaulay also gives some of the history behind each of the construction projects and provides social context to explain why our architectural forefathers went to all that trouble in the first place. For example, the Thames Tunnel was needed because traffic was bad in London even in the 1800's, and the Sehzade Mosque in Turkey (1544-48) was inspired by Justinian's Hagia Sophia, built 1,000 years before.

While there are many cross sections and close-ups of parts of the domes, some, like the Hagia Sophia or St. Paul's Cathedral, aren't shown in all their glory near the drawings of their innards, which lessens the effect of showing how the finished parts fit together. The dome section covers a lot of territory, though, spanning highlights from the Pantheon in ancient Rome to the Astrodome in modern Houston.

Human beings have created some highly ambitious works, using evolving technologies and new materials, and Macaulay has a knack for putting them into perspective in a variety of ways. ''But no matter how sophisticated these magnificent structures may become,'' he writes, ''we can count on the fact that they will continue to reveal themselves to us as long as we continue to look.'' And one hopes that David Macaulay will continue to reveal them to the rest of us in his own way as well.