Animal Architecture is a great book by the German ethologist Karl von Frisch, on the subject of (you guessed it) animal architecture. Von Frisch is probably best known for deciphering the dance of the honey-bee; this book is not one of his academic works, but is intended for the general reader. I highly recommend it to architects and designers- not, mind you, as a collection of forms to be turned verbatim into buildings (the world does not need any more spiral shell floor plans or treelike columns, thanks) but as a source of analogues and guiding principles. I don’t have a copy, but have always remembered one line from it on the topic of scale, which was brought to mind today when driving past the edgy new government building that has recently gone up in my town: a monolithic, undetailed monstrosity that completely dwarfs not only the people below it but also the existing buildings around it. The line goes something like: “The hummingbird does not build his nest out of branches, nor the eagle his of gossamer.”