David Macaulay was eleven when his family moved from England to the U.S. His fascination with simple technology and the way things worked, combined with a love of modelmaking and drawing, ultimately led him to study architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. He received his degree in 1969. The first of his internationally acclaimed books was Cathedral (1973). City (a Roman one), Pyramid, Castle, Underground, and Unbuilding (of the Empire State Building) followed. Other works include Great Moments in Architecture, Motel of the Mysteries, Mill, Baaa, and Why the Chicken Crossed the Road (the riddle is answered). He is probably best known for a very thick book called The Way Things Work (1988), an exhaustively researched compendium of the hows and whys of almost anything that functions. He won the 1991 Caldecott medal for Black and White, a considerably slimmer volume that offers four separate little stories which can also be read as one. His latest book is Ship (a Spanish Caravel), in which two stories are told, one leading to the other.