Conceived, written and designed by William Hall, Stone follows the form of its predecessors Concrete, Brick, and Wood – presenting 170 great works of architecture in a handsome, accessible and covetable package.

Each featured project is represented by a single image and an extended caption. The result is a book that has immediacy and vitality. Architects will find familiarity but also a wealth of surprises. Creative people from outside the architecture world will find breadth of invention and beauty as rich as any discipline.

Each extended caption focuses on a point of interest related to the structure. A glossary forms part of the index. Readers absorb a huge amount of information – historical, technical, stylistic and so on – in bite-sized sentences. Like architecture, the whole is substantially more than its constituent parts.

Arranged to promote comparison, the selected works take the reader on a global tour of intriguing and inspiring structures: awe-inspiring Neolithic monuments and the epic Pyramids of Giza feature alongside the work of twentieth-century icons, from Mies van der Rohe’s seminal Barcelona Pavilion to Marcel Breuer’s daring Met building in New York.

A fascinating essay by the former Director of Tate Britain, Penelope Curtis explores the close relationship between stone and architecture.