Among the other high-profile designers working in the city: London-based Zaha Hadid Architects designed a new opera house under construction, and Information Based Architecture of Amsterdam designed the TV and sightseeing tower that will contain retail shops and gardens with teahouses.

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Mr Eglin is acutely alive to the way in which the received view of Bath, as a serene and homogenous Georgian polis, works to hide the fact that for most of Nash's time the place was a construction site, squabbled over by a set of bad-tempered competing interests: builders, architects and the city corporation itself.

ECONOMIST: 18th-century Britain

Quite frequently, he saw that architects, engineers, construction foremen, and workers did not always have the most up-to-date versions of these critical documents.

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