"Who's gonna stop the rain from complaining...?" lyricist Hal David asked. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Umbrella Project in 1991 was the most ambitious and expensive project they have ever undertaken.

1340 blue six metre umbrellas were assembled and erected throughout a narrow valley in rural Japan. 7000 yellow umbrellas were similarly prepared across the Pacific in a dry expanse of Californian land. After months of gruelling process, the two countries united as the forest of umbrellas were opened simultaneously on both continents. The blue symbolised the plentitude of water in the Japanese terrain, and the yellow represented the heat of the American valley. For Christo the umbrellas were "freestanding, dynamic modules... which reflected the availability of the land in each valley, creating an invitational, inner space".

The umbrellas were removed after two weeks, but the memories of this unrepeatable and transient endeavour have now been collected in this official book of documentation designed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Thousands of photographs, plans, sketches, notes and a retrospective text provide the core source material, covering every stage of the project from inception to aftermath. A very special edition indeed.