We all know the mantra first expressed by French novelist Gustave Flaubert and later by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “le bon Dieu est dans le detail,” (God dwells in the details.) But what is a detail? Is it merely a fetish as Greg Lynn, Zaha Hadid and Peter Cook argue? “Is detailing nothing more than small-scale architectural design, requiring a bit more technical knowledge simply because it occurs at the end of the process?” asks Edward R. Ford. If there is anyone that knows details it is Edward R. Ford, and he tries to answer this seminal question in his latest book. He is the author of several other books including The Details of Modern Architecture, volumes 1 and 2, but he never answered the question of what a detail is in those two influential works.