Sculpting Cables and Concrete

...Billington shows that with the ever-widening freedom of choice made possible by new materials, function follows form...

...The engineer could expand his creative horizons to the utmost, yet at the same time rigorously reduce costs...

...David Billington, the author of The Tower and the Bridge and a professor in Princeton's civil engineering department, where I took my degree before he arrived, does not directly confront the critics...

...Why he went unpublished was a mystery to his young son and great admirer, and I'm still prepared to listen sympathetically when members of the profession speak...

...Reinforcing concrete with steel, he put up bridges and buildings that combined the compressive strength of the former with the tensile strength of the latter and simultaneously withstood concentrated pressure and bending...

...Nor is it unreasonable to wonder, in the light of the support they required from business and government, whether they had the creative freedom of painters or sculptors...

...More accomplished was Robert Mail-lart, the Swiss engineer who united German science and French daring...

...and contrary to David Noble he finds capitalism encouraging creativity, liberty and democracy...

...His effort to share the engineer's specialized knowledge provides a bridge, if not atower, that can only enhance the democratic culture he believes in, and that is reflected in our greatest monuments...

...There is a constant tension between these two types of objects—between the extremes of a frozen society where structure dominates and a frantic society dominated by machinery...

...I wish he had explicitly considered technical progress in the light of Thomas Kuhn's argument that our understanding of the natural world advances not through the gradual accumulation of knowledge but from the relatively sudden replacement of one scientific world view by another...

...The pattern became more apparent in the age of steel and concrete, when new esthetic theories fed the imagination, and private funding for skyscrapers and factories supplemented public expenditure on bridges...

...As for symbolism, he tells us: "When structure and form are one the result is a lightness, even a fragility, which closely parallels the essence of a free and open society...

...Imagine the cable frozen and turned upside down...

...Although the dichotomy seems facile and strained to me, Billington contends that these activities develop independently more often than they intersect...

...Where some of his colleagues, notably Eugene Freyssi-net, the French designer of bridges and vaults, "saw the future as new material, Maillart saw it as new forms," we are told persuasively...

...In addition, he had a hand in San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge...

...In their creative hands the discipline has become a tool of human expression whose elegance is never attained at the expense of an efficient use of materials or a regard for economic realities...

...He wants to promote democratic values by encouraging design competitions—as he sees it, the way to get the best work at the lowest cost...

...The most prominent man who embraced the new kind of thinking that became possible with the appearance of large quantities of cheap iron was a Scottish bridge builder named Thomas Telford...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History, San Francisco State University...

...At amomentwhen, asheputsit, "technology seems to stand for despoiling both the city and country," he reminds us that the best engineering still speaks to our most deeply held political and moral beliefs...

...Unlike technology and art, says the author, technology and science do not march hand in hand, for the first "is the making of things that did not previously exist," the second "the discovery of things that have long existed...

...Mathematical analysis, Billington goes on to observe, could in no way improve the effectiveness of Isler's technique...

...The inverted form will put the concrete into compression where it belongs...

...Fazlur Khan's Hancock Building, in Chicago, "expresses private investment and technology" in the service of creative self-expression and therefore "defies master plans and art juries...

...To his mind, they shaped their skills to serve the capitalist order's selfish ends—most blatantly through the doctrine of scientific management a la Frederick W. Taylor, who regarded employees as potential machines, but more subtly by j oining giant companies where they created uniform standards, undermined lonely inventors while sponsoring organized research, and underwrote vocational schools to produce soldier-laborers who would be commanded by the officer-graduates of management programs...

...Christian Menn's Ganter Bridge, in Switzerland, "is the other side...

...never, the author claims, did computers design anything...

...Intuitively Telford saw that iron removed much of the distinction between art and craft, that now engineering "could take its place with the other plastic and visual arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture...

...formerly instructor in Civil Engineering, University of Pennsylvania During the first flush of our ecological awareness, Gene Marine's A merica the Raped: The Engineering Mentality and the Devastation of a Continent (1969) attacked the U.S...

...Even Billington's rather weak argument, however, manifests a strength of his: an interest in the social and symbolic implications of engineering...

...Not so convincing is the claim that his superiority was stimulated by competition...

...I myself grew up hearing a different point of view...

...He has attempted a major reinterpretation of technology's relationship with art, raising questions that are provocative even if his answers are not always fully satisfying...

...Then David Noble's America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (1977) portrayed engineers as insidious allies of big business...

...It was first achieved with iron, available in almost unlimited quantities from the start of the Industrial Revolution in mid-18 th century Britain, and the only alternative to wood and stone until the 1880s...

...On a different level, one regrets that the author's intimate knowledge of his material occasionally leaves the general reader far behind...

...machines for change, mobility, and risk...

...The same image is later enlarged upon in a discussion of the Swiss Heinz Is-ler: He "stretches a cloth held at seven points, coats it with wet plastic, lets it sag, and when the plastic hardens there has solidified a new form, which when inverted makes a thin shell roof on seven supports...

...His message is closer to my dad's because his focus is an elite group of structural engineers who, he believes, qualify both as public servants and as artists...

...Of the two kinds of structures, Billington's first love is the bridge, which offers greater possibilities for viewing the designer's artistry...

...As materials changed, so did the ways of juxtaposing them and the geometrical forms of construction...

...Clearly, Billington poses a vision of engineers that is the opposite of Gene Marine's...

...One of the favored form's true masters was New York's Othmar Ammann, who created two cantilever bridges (the Goethals and the Outerbridge Crossing), one suspension (the George Washington) and one arch (the Bayonne...

...He illustrates this in the work of major figures (Telford, Gustave Eiffel, John Roebling) and of lesser lights (Robert Stevenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunei), as well as in his discussion of developments in Germany, Italy and Spain...

...Furthermore, he asserts, the greatest achievements of form coincide with a simple, human analysis...

...the result is an arch, and a series of such arches can form a dome surface...

...This notion strikes me as very debatable, too, and if proven (or provable) would seem to raise questions about innovation in the design of structures...

...Despite its few lapses, I find Billington' s book admirable...

...Thereafter, steel and concrete came into their own...

...The aphorism has it that form follows function...

...I applaud him for analyzing the cultural characteristics of engineering, but I fear that his labels—"democratic," "simple," and "competitive"— tend to idealize the West...

...a short glossary and some diagrams would have helped clarify a number of concepts...

...Billington also divides technology into the "static" and the "dynamic," structures and machines: "Structures stand for continuity, tradition, and protection of society...

...My father, a persistent pop poet, dedicated this couplet to his fellow civil engineers: "Building bridges, spanning chasms/envied by all protoplasms...

...Since this book is well-illustrated, structural art's esthetic power is abundantly evident...

...More often, though, the descriptions are graphic and self-explanatory, as in the following: "Gravity dictates the shape taken by a suspension bridge cable under a load...

...Virtually ignorant of—and consequently unconstrained by—scientific theory, he relied on his practical field experience and his imagination, taking risks that reflected the ferment of the times, the late 18th and early 19th centuries...

...But it needs to be remembered that he is concentrating on a select group within the profession...

...From these general considerations Billington turns to the artists themselves...

...it expresses government planning of public works essential to democratic societies...

...Army Corps of Engineers and similar outfits for flagrantly destroying our ecosystems...

...Like their counterparts in earlier times, these 20th-century achievements have symbolic and social implications...