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Article by Michael Carley
Without engineers nothing would stand up; without architects, we would not want it to. The world we live in is the world engineers have made; the world we see is the architects’. How could we possibly expect such people to get along?
Yet they do: sometimes well, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes badly. The surprise is that, in practice, they rarely fall out and Monet, Crane and Wordsworth have profited from their work. Andrew Saint’s book explains where the siblings came from, how they have learned to get along, and how they have made us.
First, it should be said that the book is as beautiful as its subject: just short of five hundred pages of text and heavily illustrated with well-chosen images, it could stand up as a photographic exhibition or as an unillustrated essay. Saint knows the history of his subject and can explain it and why it matters. The book covers the development of engineering (mainly structural) and architecture, together and apart, as professions and as buildings in America, France and Britain with a strong showing from Germany and the odd glance at the Netherlands and Russia.
A good way to understand engineering and how it works is to look at a product, any product, and ask yourself `why is this the way it is and why is it not some other way?’ Saint explains why engineering and architecture are the way they are and why French engineering and architecture are not the same as American which in turn is not the same as British.
In the beginning the trades of building were without form and there was little, if any, distinction between engineers, architects and, don’t forget, contractors: the modern categories do not really apply to Brunelleschi’s work on the Duomo of Florence. The beginning of the separation lies in the French state’s extension of its reach and the establishment of a military engineering school initially concerned with fortifications and other military works. The works of Vauban, still standing in many places, are examples of the beginning of the tradition that carries through to the grandiose relics of twentieth century French presidents. By 1664, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of finance, was establishing the centralized state apparatus which would extend this military engineering prowess into the civil state, notwithstanding his knowledge of “the pride and jealousy of architects”. The Académie d’Architecture was expected to establish an architectural doctrine while the Ponts et Chaussées and the Génie would do the engineering. The attempt to set a standard failed, and “the highest echelon of French architecture eloped in a love affair with the fine artists”. Plus ça change …
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Channel, the English were muddling through. Charles II was probably right when he told Pepys that “England has never bred an able engineer of its own”. Nor would it for a while. Training of military engineers was sketchy and the reconstruction of London after the Great Fire was a missed opportunity for civil engineers and architects. The great British flowering of engineering would have to wait until the Industrial Revolution it started and was nourished by. The attitudes established then, of practicality over theory, remain the basis of a British engineering education, distinct from the strongly scientific approach of the continental engineering schools.
In the Americas, meanwhile, developments had to wait for the importing of European, mainly French, know-how to get things started. When the Army Corps of Engineers, still responsible for much of America’s infrastructure, was established, many of the early academic staff were French, because the French had an idea of engineering education and, as the superintendent of West Point said, “I cannot find any full English idea [for] what the French give to the profession.”
The seeds of an American style of engineering were there, however: in a country with, at the time, a relatively low level of technological development, certain forms of construction developed because they had to. A Pennsylvania farmer, James Finley, invented the suspension bridge by hanging a deck from chains to form, in effect, a glorified rope bridge. He had bridged 150 feet with double spans of 150 feet and 244 feet with a single span when his ideas began to be taken up elsewhere. The great suspension bridges that are part of our image of America at its best began with a farmer who needed to get a wagon across a river when masonry bridges were not an option.
The bulk of the book is a discussion of technologies, not the beeping, whistling gadgets that appear in the `technology’ column of newspapers, but the fundamental matter that makes us civilized: iron, concrete, steel; girders, slabs, cables; bridges, skyscrapers, stations. These technologies worked their way from engineering structures — factories and railway bridges — to become standard methods for architects and engineers working together to produce the buildings that make our cities.
There are beautiful things throughout the book: iron churches; glasshouse rooves becoming train stations; engineers innovating in structure and architects innovating in form. These innovations happened as both siblings understood the possibilities a new technology offered. As they challenged each other, the new materials were first concealed, to make new buildings look like old, and then revealed to make new buildings look modern.
It may be a surprise to learn how much of London was built using the daring new technology of structural iron: Buckingham Palace, the Royal Opera House, the Houses of Parliament, the British Museum. While Marx sat in one predicting the supersession of another, he sat in a building of iron girders carefully concealed where decent society would not be scandalized by them. This new structural technology initially caused architects some problems, usually solved by encasing the girders in “timber or plaster”, until they realized that a competent founder could cast a variety of patterns and iron could be decorative.
Outside London, the railway engineers, now lionized as their creation festers, were building bridges and stations. The early stations were characterized by a “ludicrous tinge” as architects were hired to make the new structures more palatable to the good burghers of Liverpool and Manchester. Moorish arches and classical facades sprouted up. Stations copied their technology from hothouses. Liverpool Lime Street’s curved iron roof was supplied by Richard Turner who had built the Palm House at Kew; a technology developed to let light onto tropical plants was adapted to allow light onto passengers in a large covered station.
The book is a series of such stories where engineers use a new technology to extend their reach, to make buildings taller, spaces wider or bridges longer and architects see the aesthetic possibilities, the chance to let us live differently. The heroes — not too strong a word — of the book are those engineers, architects and engineer-architects who saw possibilities in things now done so well that we ignore them: concrete was a new technology once. If we notice it at all, it is usually for the graffiti, but the Sydney Opera House is made of the same stuff as a multi-storey car park. The story of how the architect’s vision was made possible is usually presented as the story of “the technologists moving in dutifully behind to make things work. Things are seldom that simple.” The leap of insight that showed how the Sydney Opera House could be made, could be turned into a thing and not be left a sketch, is one of the highlights of the book. When the solution was devised, Ove Arup had to throw away four years of work at the expense of a row in a team of talented engineers. But they did it, and a great building was made possible.
In the account of the work of Le Corbusier is a short statement of what it is that makes architects different from artists and, whether they like it or not, makes them siblings of the engineers: “from watchmaking he learnt the deepest lesson an architect can take from handicraft — a feeling for the nature and limits of materials.” Engineering students who will never use a spanner in anger take workshop courses for the same reason: the end result is a thing and that thing will be tested against reality in ways that art is not. Bridges are not failures because artistic fashions change, but because they fail the test of reality. The engineer and the architect are both looking for a creative solution to the problem of manipulating matter to make it do something useful. They are usually only noticed when they get it wrong. When they get it right, silent assent is gratitude. This book tells us about the struggle to get it right and why useful things are the way they are and not some other way. When Saint describes a bridge as “moving”, he is right to do so and not only for the “architecture” of the bridge but also for its “engineering”. A simple concrete bridge can be moving, as Hart Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge can be, not for the people they link, or for the bridge as a metaphor but because the bridge is a human attempt to do something and to make it right and to make it work so well that you take it for granted.
If this seems too much to claim, Saint’s book contains a full page photograph of one of Robert Maillart’s concrete bridges at Salginatobel in Switzerland, completed in 1930. The structure appears almost impossibly frail, “a trough leaping the gap from precipice to precipice”. As the caption notes, “the build-up of trees has made this view impossible today”. How often can we rightly say that a view has been ruined by trees?
Yale University Press, 530 pp, ISBN-13: 978-0300124439
Terrific review Michael …
“… the railway engineers, now lionized as their creation festers …”
How terribly and woefully true. It isn’t until an event like the refurbishment of St Pancras comes along that most people even NOTICE the magnificence of Victorian railway architecture, for which I am a total sucker.
What a wonderful review of what is obviously a riveting book – I MUST rush out and get it. Thank you for revealing its ideas so clearly and concisely.
Do I take it that engineers come out on top in the sibling rivalry? Hooray! Tales of heroics of new technology are so exciting – I did not know the story of the origin of the suspension bridge, and I’m delighted to find it out. Bridges are the true exemplar, aren’t they – they either stay up, or they fall down, and their very failures are always heroic because of the pushing of boundaries.
Thank you for introducing me to this book!
Excellent review of a book that sounds fascinating. While I do notice architectural details, I never think about the engineering principles that make them possible, so this was an eye opener. It sounds like it makes a long & complex subject very accessible, the review makes it quite enticing.And the cover is fittingly atmospheric.
“It isn’t until an event like the refurbishment of St Pancras comes along that most people even NOTICE the magnificence of Victorian railway architecture, for which I am a total sucker.”
Somebody on the refurbishment had a sense of history at St Pancras: they decided to keep the distance between pillars. The reason why this matters: St Pancras is built on pillars because trains would not have been able to make the steep climb out of the station over the Regent’s Canal, so the tracks were raised to avoid a drop to ground level. This meant there was space beneath the platforms. St Pancras being the line
from the Midlands, and in particular Burton on Trent, the pillars were set three standard barrels apart so that the space could be rented out to the brewers who were bringing in the beer from Burton.
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