Macaulay considers concealing technology's inner mechanics as a growing problem for society, and aims to fight this trend with his work. However, the new sheep-inhabited world develops the same side effects of economic disparity, crime, and war. Sheep discover artifacts of lost human civilization and attempt to rebuild it. Baaa is set after the human race has somehow gone extinct. Motel of the Mysteries, written in 1979 after the 1976–1979 exhibition of the Tutankhamun relics in the U.S., concerns the discovery by future archaeologists of an American motel and their ingenious interpretation of the building and its contents as a funerary and temple complex. Illustrations in The Way Things Work depict cave people and woolly mammoths operating giant-sized versions of the devices he is explaining. His books often display a whimsical humor.
The Way Things Work is his most commercially successful series and served as the basis for a short-lived educational television program.
This was expanded and re-released as The New Way Things Work (1998) and The Way Things Work Now (2016). Macaulay is probably best known for the popular children's book The Way Things Work (1988, text by Neil Ardley). Other books in this series are Underground (1976), which describes the building foundations and support structures (like water and sewer pipes) that underlie a typical city intersection, and Unbuilding (1980), which describes the hypothetical dismantling of the Empire State Building in preparation for re-erection in the Middle East. Cathedral, City, Pyramid, Castle, and Mill were later adapted into documentaries produced by Unicorn Productions, each of which aired sporadically on PBS from 1983 to 1994. The September 11 attacks motivated Macaulay to create Mosque to show how the traditions of major religions have more in common than they have dividing them. This was followed by a series of books of the same type: City (1974), on the construction of Verbonia, a fictitious but typical ancient Roman city Pyramid (1975), a collection of diagrams and sketches illustrating the construction process of the pyramid monuments to the Egyptian Pharaohs Castle (1977), on the construction of Aberwyvern castle, a fictitious but typical medieval castle Mill (1983), on the evolution of New England mills and Mosque (2003), which depicts the design and construction of an Ottoman-style masjid. His first book, Cathedral (1973), was a history, extensively illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings, of the construction of a fictitious but representative Gothic cathedral. Macaulay is the author of several books on architecture and design. Macaulay currently lives in Norwich, Vermont.
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