Architect,Engineer,and Builder

Few would deny that the architect, engineer, and builder’s relationship in constructing large-scale structures within urban and broader geographic environments—among them skyscrapers, railroad stations, tunnels, canals, and bridges—is a complex affair. But scholarship on the pattern of thought informing their decision-making, whether individually or in collaboration, is a relatively recent phenomenon. The books under review are large, substantial, and authoritative in their own right. Just as significantly, they have altered the landscape of scholarship on the built environment. Previously, the architect and planner occupied primary positions within this scholarship. But as this recent work demonstrates, the engineer and builder have contributed equally important talent and expertise to the creation of the buildings, cities, and public works with which we are so familiar today.

Andrew Saint’s comprehensive Architect and Engineer is the latest contribution to this new body of scholarship. In scrutinizing the relationship between the architect and engineer, Saint aims at no less than fully explaining the joint—and at times contentious—creative process informing key works of modern architecture, along with engineering and urban design, from the Enlightenment down to the present.

How are the respective worlds represented by the architect and engineer brought together in envisioning, conceptualizing, and designing the built environment? Saint pursues this question through a thorough exploration of the societal and institutional settings in which the two disciplines developed, the various educational missions informing the training for each, their similarities and differences in problem solving, and, most important, the specific circumstances under which the work of each intersect in the creation of major structures of all kinds—sometimes decisively and sometimes ambiguously. In the end, Saint provides a highly contextual treatment of both disciplines, resulting in a narrative that is panoramic in sweep and far-reaching in topical coverage and plethora of detail. The breadth and originality of the book’s illustrations add credence to his endeavor.

Saint’s book is structured according to the various standpoints from which he views the architect–engineer relationship. These include his analysis of the materials of construction themselves, chief among them are iron and reinforced concrete, immensely important for the many ways in which they stimulated entirely new worlds of technical experimentation while spurring the growth of engineering as a profession. They also include his assessment of certain iconic structures—among them the Crystal Palace, the Eiffel Tower, the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Station, and the Sydney Opera House—which stand front and center in his story. In seeking a context for such projects, Saint explores the complexity of the social and political phenomena shaping their creation. From his account of the Sydney Opera House, for example, the reader learns not only about the conflicted relationship between architect Jorn Utzon and the engineer Ove Arup but also about the role of Australia’s South Wales government in making independent and frequently contentious decisions about the project’s design and construction. Key public works as well as lesser known infrastructural systems also form an important part of Saint’s inquiry, among them bridges, canals, railroads, and highways, along with city planning. Saint’s concern is essentially the entire domain of construction shared by the practitioners working within the two disciplines.

For Saint, the nineteenth-century railway station serves as an especially effective building type for illustrating the shifting dynamic of creative responsibility between the architect and the engineer. From the earliest examples, among them London’s Euston Station (1837), railway stations reflected the sharpness of the division between the worlds of architecture and engineering. Typically, an engineer’s spectacular shed joined the more conventional architecture of a front, often a hotel. Still, in Paris, Léonce Reynaud, working as both architect and engineer, and fully meriting his dual title, managed to combine the best of both worlds in the first Gare du Nord (1843-1846). By the late nineteenth century, the Amsterdam Central Station (1882-1889) raised the question of whether the talents of the engineer might indeed outshine those of the architect. The architect P. J. H. Cuypers lamented that the shed conceived by the engineer Van Prehn, Leyds & Eymer, vast and spatially distinctive, too strongly dominated his own station front. He had envisioned that front as a monumental urban focal point. Grand Central Station in New York (1903-1913), designed by the architects Warren and Wetmore with the engineers Reed and Stem, however, proved the opposite to be true, decisively marking the triumph of architecture. Grand Central’s engineering, with the lower level concourse, shed, and tracks defining a completely separate world, scarcely made an impact on the monumental Beaux-Arts grandeur of the station’s interior. For Saint, Grand Central marks “the moment when the railroad station is handed back to the architect on a plate” (p. 126).

For architectural historians, Saint’s most important lesson is his penetrating analysis of the creative reality—in which the engineer has at times assumed a pivotal role—undergirding widely acclaimed works of modern architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple and Le Corbusier’s “Dom-Ino” frame, for example, icons through which their designers secured a heroic status in twentieth-century historiography, are in fact the products of Wright’s heavy reliance on the engineer Paul Mueller and Le Corbusier’s on the engineer Max Du Bois, imaginative professionals whose contributions have been largely forgotten. As is well-known today, Louis Kahn failed to credit his engineer, August Komendant, in conceiving the “purely mathematical” cycloid profile that defined the vaults of the Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth (p. 407). The vaults’ strength in spanning as well as potentials for admitting light continue to function today as the leitmotif for the museum.

In certain cases, Saint shows how the engineer outshone the architect in the role of a key partner and collaborator. The partnership between the engineer Fazlur Khan and the architect Bruce Graham within Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, for example, made possible the famous breakthrough signified by the one-hundred-story John Hancock Center (1965-1970) in Chicago: Kahn’s refinement of the so-called “tube” structural method for building economically to record-breaking heights. The skylines of world cities would never be the same again. The Hancock’s distinctive “exoskeleton,” nonetheless, is uniquely Graham’s contribution. In Graham’s view, construction to such heights required that the facilitating structural means be honestly exposed in a way comparable with those of Paris’s Eiffel Tower (1889).

Among the most interesting of built structures to which Saint directs his sensitive and nuanced eye are those in which the distinction between the architects’ and engineers’ respective contributions are not so easily defined. His analysis of the Eiffel Tower, designed in fact by Gustav Eiffel in collaboration with Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nougier, reveals that Eiffel himself disliked the project prior to the architect Stephen Sauvestre’s additions of shape, ornament, and style to his and his collaborators’ engineering, transforming the tower into the landmark that we recognize today. This corrects the popular view that the Eiffel Tower illustrates the triumph of the engineer as well as iron construction, which Saint calls “poor history” (p. 164). At Paris’s Centre Pompidou, by contrast, the architects Renzo Piano and Norman Foster—while instrumental to the success of the design—unabashedly took credit for the aesthetic breakthroughs of their engineer, the Ove Arup & Partners firm, and, in particular, for those of Peter Rice, whose cast-steel “gerberettes” quickly assumed iconic status as the project’s most memorable and photographed detail. Eero Saarinen, likewise, is widely known as the architect of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, but if the engineer Fred Severud is correct, the precise lines governing the arch’s shape—that is, the mathematics of the curve—should be attributed instead to him and his firm. Such analyses on Saint’s part show that the engineer and the architect are more often than not involved in highly complex dialogue, which historians have too often simplified in favor of larger, frequently deterministic arguments about technology and style.

Saint devotes substantial space to bridges as a project type. Although primarily works of engineering, the bridges of eighteenth-century Paris and London called for urban propriety and hence aesthetics—the architect’s forte. Jean-Rodolphe Perronet, the premier engineer of the Corps des Pont et Chaussées, for example, emphasized architectural expression over calculations and technical theories in bridge design. With the introduction of long-spanning suspension bridges in the early nineteenth century, however, questions of engineering came to the fore. John and Washington Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge (1869-1883) is memorable for its elegance, nonetheless, and has since its completion remained in a fascinating dialogue with New York City; it is precisely such a dialogue that in Saint’s view elevates the bridge into “architecture.” Saint concludes his analysis of the suspension bridge with Leon Moisseiff’s infamous “Galloping Gertie” (1938-1940), which spanned the Tacoma Narrows in Washington. The unprecedented slenderness of Moisseiff’s bridge deck had aesthetic virtues, but with its destruction by wind-induced oscillation, “the fall-out from Galloping Gertie ended the American supremacy in suspension bridge design” (p. 346).

Of greatest importance to Saint’s study of the relationship between the architect and engineer is his historical analysis of their respective systems of education, windows onto the cultures of the disciplines themselves. In doing so, he emphasizes the nineteenth-century polytechnical model, which originated in France but reached an apogee in Germany, where science, engineering, and the technical disciplines joined with architecture to bring unity to the “arts of construction” (p. 488). From the Bauakademie in Berlin of 1799 to the founding of the Buahaus in 1919, the model held sway in Germany. It also influenced education in Switzerland at the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum Zurich (later ETH Zurich) as well as in America at the West Point Military Academy, founded in 1802 for the purpose of training the nation’s recently established “Corps of Engineers,” and then later at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the University of Illinois.

Ultimately, Saint provides a more sophisticated and totalizing account of the modern built environment’s engineering, design, and construction than previously available. Architect and Engineer may well take the place of current textbooks whose subject is modern architecture. Still, a student approaching the subject for the first time would benefit from a leaner and more concise version of Saint’s original, with a greater thematic emphasis, a clearer hierarchy among topics, and less exhaustive detail. The sections on bridge design and education currently function as stand-alone essays within the book and are authoritative in their own right. Still, Saint’s book conclusively demonstrates that modern buildings, infrastructures, and cities are the products of many types of knowledge from the disciplines of architecture as well as engineering.

Saint’s scholarship, in dazzling scope and ambition, redefines the history of modern architecture to account for the contribution of the engineer. But with regard to urban history and the societal condition within which the disciplines of architecture and engineering are embedded, Robert Bruegmann’s The Architects and the City and Eda Kranakis’s Constructing a Bridge are, in some ways, more satisfying to the reader. Bruegmann focuses on the trajectory of Chicago’s Holabird and Roche, emphasizing the firm’s wide array of project types and their relationship to the growth of the city between 1880 and 1918. Kranakis’s study, a comparative history of two early nineteenth-century suspension bridges, shows a parallel concern with the larger social, economic, and intellectual milieu as the crucial environment for key intellectual breakthroughs in engineering, in her case the city of Paris by contrast to the sparsely populated frontier landscape of rural America.

Bruegmann’s The Architects and the City is a skillful synthesis of architectural and urban history, presenting a marked contrast to the typical emphasis in architectural history on the analysis of a single architect’s works independently of a particular urban or environmental setting. Bruegmann instead concentrates a good part of his effort on the history of Chicago as a city, from the boom period of the late 1880s, followed by the bust of 1893, and, finally, through the second boom that peaked in 1910, at which time Holabird and Roche, having contracted in 1893 to as few as three employees, comprised more than one hundred draftsmen, making it one of the largest firms in the country. Within these economic cycles of boom and bust, the firm designed hundreds of individual works, which piece by piece shaped the streets of Chicago, most prominently among them State Street and Michigan Avenue. In doing so, Holabird and Roche participated in the city’s breathtaking process of urban modernization, which incorporated new transportation systems and new technologies of building—innovative techniques of metal framing, isolated footings, and fireproofing—and fostered the professionalization of the architect as well as the engineer. Accompanying these major changes, Bruegmann argues, were a plethora of equally important supporting technologies, including the telephone, telegraph, and new methods of lighting, heating, and sanitation, all of which engineers and inventors conceived to serve the city’s expanding hives of well-paid managerial employees, who sought in turn well-lit, refined, and up-to-date spaces for office work close to the heart of the city.

Bruegmann views the city’s skyscrapers as but a single phenomenon within the context of a much broader urban panorama. The latter by its very nature incorporated many other building types, among them automobile showrooms, hotels, public buildings, telephone exchanges, and private clubs. Beyond the city’s core, it featured houses in the streetcar suburbs and even a camp, the Coleman Lake Club, built on the remains of the logging industry in the countryside. Bruegmann’s analysis of the skyscraper, however, is particularly distinctive in overturning certain common assumptions held by a previous generation of scholars, chief among them the notion that William Le Baron Jenney’s Home Insurance Building (1884-1885) merited its long-standing iconic stature as the world’s “first” metal-framed skyscraper and, as such, served as the signature achievement of the so-called “Chicago School.”

In Bruegmann’s reinterpretation of the Chicago skyscraper, Holabird and Roche’s Tacoma Building (1886-1889) is analyzed as the earliest example of true “skeleton construction,” that is, as a metal frame with a thin terra cotta cladding that served as a bona fide envelope, as opposed to the bulkier Home Insurance Building, in which the walls, still carrying some of the structural load, functioned in a more ambiguous relationship with the frame. Bruegmann finds the Tacoma Building equally important for the method by which its builder, George A. Fuller, constructed it. For the first time in Chicago, Fuller assumed responsibility under a single contract for virtually all of the construction work, with the aim of “delivering” the completed project to its owner, Wirt D. Walker, for a contractually predetermined fixed price on “schedule time” (p. 82). Thus, the Tacoma marked the emergence of a wholly new phenomenon, the “general contractor.”

Bruegmann relates key buildings and building types to particular urban conditions. On State Street, the city’s retail axis, the firm developed a new type of building, the “tall shops building,” as exemplified by the Republic, North American, and Century buildings, which fused the steel-framed loft typology with an elegant, ornamental exterior of white glazed terra cotta, featuring large plate glass windows. At Michigan Avenue and East Monroe Street, its designs for the University Club and Monroe Building paired visually to form a dignified portal to the avenue. Along South Michigan Avenue, the firm designed automobile showrooms to create an urban sequence known as “automobile row.” Hotels such as the Congress, La Salle, and Sherman House, featuring gracious public spaces in distinctive historical styles, among them a Pompeiian Room, Celtic Bar, and German Grill, served as microcosms of “what was best in the city as a whole” (p. 335). The firm’s telephone exchanges in the downtown as well as the city’s neighborhoods functioned as nodes in the city’s nervous system. The monumentality, order, and stateliness of the Cook County Courthouse and the Chicago City Hall embodied the city’s aspirations for a better government amid the day’s bureaucratic bungling and municipal corruption. Bruegmann never wavers from his central theme: Holabird and Roche succeeded not only in shaping the physical city as it was experienced and perceived at the turn of the twentieth century but also in bringing dignity to the daily lives of its inhabitants. The firm aspired, moreover, to ennoble future generations with “quiet” buildings distinguished not by their visual novelty or showiness as “art architecture” but instead by propriety and grace.

Through its comparison of two suspension bridges, Eda Kranakis’s Constructing a Bridge examines the American rural frontier by contrast to Paris as unique settings for solving a particular engineering design problem. In doing so, Kranakis defines two very different intellectual milieus and hence two very different engineering cultures of the early nineteenth century. The book’s first few chapters examine the suspension bridge conceived by the American farmer and inventor James Finley, who envisioned his prototypical design as a “system for construction” for a variety of rural sites, some forty in all. Kranakis then explores Claude-Louis-Marie-Henri’s contrasting and singular design for the Pont des Invalides in Paris. Along the way, she examines in great depth Finley and Navier’s process of designing the two bridges as works of engineering, including detailed analyses of their structural behavior. But Kranakis’s main emphasis is on the broad context of ideas and, in particular, on the institutional structures and societal values that informed the respective engineers’ methods of conceptual thought.

Throughout his process of designing the Pont des Invalides, Navier, who studied at Paris’s Ecole Polytechnique, formulated new theories and employed increasingly sophisticated mathematical calculations. But in the end, he aimed not to simply engineer a bridge but rather to demonstrate for Paris’s engineering and scientific community an idealized mathematical model, or, as he put it, a “monumental design.” This, like an elegant work of architecture such as the neighboring Hotel des Invalides, would bring glory to France. In proposing such an idealized model, incorporating interrelated formulas for the suspension cable’s curve, tension, angle of inclination, and length (albeit neglecting the messy problem of wind oscillation), Navier aspired to no less than creating a new body of engineering knowledge. In America, by contrast, the nation’s relatively underdeveloped economy and infrastructure encouraged Finley to pursue a practice-based research method, in which conceptual tools such as “experimental set-ups,” or two-dimensional scale models, determined empirically the most efficient curve of the bridge’s suspension cable. Finley’s objectives, given their empirical basis, diametrically opposed the loftier analytical ideal of Navier and, in addition, assumed an elemental system of construction by local craftsmen, that is, by a broader, generic “do-it-yourself” marketplace.

In the most poignant part of the book, Kranakis assesses the effectiveness of Finley and Navier’s designs in practice. Finley’s design thrived for a brief period in the early nineteenth century but, after 1830, fell into eclipse, due in large part to the competition presented by wooden bridges and truss structures, and in particular by the “Town Truss,” which Ithiel Town patented in 1820. To a lesser extent, Finley’s design suffered from poor marketing, susceptibility to alterations by builders eager to cut corners, and persisting concerns about its possible failure under the excessive winter conditions of snow and cold, the latter of which actually caused the collapse of three bridges. Thus, the design, while eminently constructible and broad in applicability, failed in the end to achieve the destiny to which its inventor aspired.

By contrast, Navier’s design for the Pont des Invalides in Paris illuminates the difficulties confronted by an idealistic engineer-scientist when applying sophisticated mathematical theories. When Navier completed drawings for his wholly unique design, a committee of experts from the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées praised it as a “monument,” noting that “theory everywhere illuminates practice” (p. 180). But during construction, the project’s builder stopped work on the bridge when the accident of a broken water main caused its anchorages to upturn and tilt toward the river, a public spectacle of failure that also fomented a “social collapse,” that is, hostility among the city’s private sector engineers and entrepreneurs (p. 189). They had long opposed both Navier and the Corps’s idealization of the mathematical theories, which they identified with the elitism of France’s aristocratic past. As a consequence, Navier watched the demolition of his own design, the very project that summed up in visible form the trajectory of his entire intellectual career.

Kranakis might have concluded her analysis with such an in-depth assessment of Finley and Navier’s bridges as designs in their own right, but instead branches out in the second half of Constructing a Bridge to an illuminating analysis of what she calls “the social determinants of engineering practice,” among them education, engineering societies, and the political settings for the engineer’s professional work. In France, aspiring engineers entered one of three schools in a hierarchically tiered system of education: the Ecole Polytechnique, with its exclusive study of abstract mathematics; the practice-oriented Ecole Centrale; or the workshop-oriented École d’Arts et Métiers. In America, by contrast, a far less stratified, more open-ended system of engineering education had begun by mid-century to integrate aspects of mathematical study, laboratory training, and workshops. French engineers who graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique went on to participate in a highly structured state bureaucracy that rewarded theoretical accomplishments with election to the Academy of Sciences, whereas in America, institutions of engineering education took little interest in developing such an elite with a vested interest in “mathematical theory.” Consequently, American engineers in practice—Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers among them—emphasized instead the virtues of design-oriented empirical research and, along with it, patents and material success.

In the end, Kranakis leaves the reader with an especially keen understanding of early nineteenth-century engineering thought, both theoretical and empirical, and, more broadly, of its impact on the cultures of engineering practice in America and France. Still, the book’s multiple conclusions reiterating the same point again and again—essentially that the French prevailed as sophisticated mathematical theorists and the Americans as practice-oriented pragmatists—leaves the reader wishing for a more extended, faceted argument that might have invested the study with greater thematic continuity. Bruegmann, by contrast, achieves great thematic clarity in explaining Holabird and Roche’s contribution to the design and construction of Chicago—staggering in its size and breadth—during a critical period of the city’s history. While both authors deepen our understanding of how works of architecture or engineering illuminated a particular societal and cultural condition, Bruegmann presents an especially compelling sense of time and place.

Henry Petroski’s Invention by Design and Tom Peters’s Building the Nineteenth Century (1996) share as their principal aim the elucidation of the engineer’s and the builder’s respective processes of thought. Petroski emphasizes the conceptual work of the individual engineer as inventor, whereas Peters focuses on the larger patterns of reasoning that informed the organization of major construction projects across historical time, or what is commonly known today as “construction management.” Both authors agree, however, that such processes of thought are seldom linear and straightforward. They are contingent instead on a project’s wide array of contextual variables: social, political, economic, and even aesthetic and ethical. To this end, Petroski and Peters employ case studies to illustrate how engineers and builders proceed from a concept to the creation of an object, structure, or major work of construction. Petroski demonstrates the commonality of engineering thought across all scales of design, from the paper clip to the skyscraper and infrastructural systems of water supply and removal. Peters’s objective is to define the historical stages of the builder’s “procedural thinking” in the sequencing of large-scale construction projects. Whereas Petroski highlights the engineer’s overarching aims of economy and elegance in design, Peters calls attention to the builder’s logic of method, with its corresponding aim of rationalization toward a timely result.

Petroski structures Invention by Design around nine case studies. In starting with the paper clip, he shows how even the simplest of objects can provide the most revealing of lessons about the complexity of engineering thought. The classic “Gem paper clip,” for example, introduced in England during the late nineteenth century by Gem, Ltd., has been the focus of the continual reinvention and redesign of similar clips in various guises, among them the “Gothic-style paper clip” (1934), the “straight-topped paper clip” (1991), and several hundred additional variants. All of these, with the exception of the Gem, have received patent protection. By contrast to the paper clip, Petroski’s analysis of water supply and removal focuses on the type of engineering thought behind public works that function on a grand scale as systems and, as a consequence, must take into account a much broader set of social–political circumstances. The beginnings of such thought can be traced to ancient Rome, where engineers deployed the large quantities of water (forty million gallons per day) furnished by aqueducts to supply fountains and baths but, more importantly, to flush out sewers. Still, only in the nineteenth century, with the growth of cities and accompanying outbreaks of disease, did professional “sanitary engineers” begin to tackle the problem of wastewater removal in a big, organized way. In two of the nineteenth century’s biggest industrial cities, London and Chicago, the engineers’ designs proved to be especially complicated. In Chicago, they entailed no less than reversing the flow of the Chicago River, thus allowing Lake Michigan to serve as a clean water supply.

Petroski focuses on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge as a case study that presented engineers with unprecedented technological challenges, given its eight-mile length, deep water piers, and long spans (with clearance for shipping). Given the scenic beauty of San Francisco Bay, the city’s Bridge Commission charged Charles H. Purcell, California’s state highway engineer, with determining the best location for the bridge and with retaining architects to advise on aesthetics. After receiving thirty-eight proposals, the Commission appointed a board of engineers to determine the bridge’s final design. Upon opening in 1936, the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge comprised two distinct bridge types joined together by a tunnel excavated through Yerba Buena Island—a pair of double-deck suspension bridges and a great cantilever bridge connected to a number of smaller spans (one of which collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake). The bridge is today underrecognized as an achievement, given its more famous neighbor, the Golden Gate Bridge, but it still demonstrates “the many interrelated complexities that go along with all large engineering projects” (p. 160). Such projects, Petroski maintains, are fundamentally human endeavors. They are also products of local circumstances, whether the dictates of awe-inspiring scenic beauty or urban politics. Such an emphasis on human and local complexities distinguishes Petroski’s method as a scholar from that of Kranakis, whose main concern is “intellectual culture.” This was already evident in his classic work, Engineers of Dreams (1995), a history and biography of the nineteenth and twentieth century’s major bridge designers published one year prior to Invention by Design.

Petroski’s Engineers of Dreams emphasizes that the structural engineers who designed bridges in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are indeed human; for this reason, they dream. Petroski corrects a contemporary popular perception of the engineer as a mere technician. He wants readers to understand the romance of engineering as a discipline and indeed achieves this through compelling human stories about noted engineers and famous structures. Regarding the Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, for example, he explains that “bridges and cities go together” and that certain bridges are beautiful in their own right. Thus, they might also achieve distinction as a symbol for a city. Still, Petroski’s ultimate aim is, as he puts it, “a fully integrated view of technology, society, and culture” (p. 18).

Even in light of Petroski’s abiding concern with the broader circumstantial context for engineering, his Invention by Design is foremost an exploration of the individual engineer’s process of design. Petroski concludes his book with the Crystal Palace and the skyscraper. He notes that in addition to the Crystal Palace’s assembly from manufactured, standardized components, the design incorporated several carefully controlled systems and hence functioned like a machine. Designer Joseph Paxton had proposed such systems for greenhouses, but those of the Crystal Palace still more ingeniously regulated water supply and controlled heat from the sun. For the latter, Paxton deployed louvered wall panels and canvas roof screens from which water evaporated; without them the design might have been “as stifling as a hot house” (p. 192). Systems such as Paxton’s—along with the subsequent development of the elevator, the early potentials of which the Eiffel Tower’s double-decker system signified in 1889—provided important precedents for the skyscraper.

Petroski justifiably calls attention to the Woolworth Building as the seminal early twentieth-century skyscraper. The extraordinary depth of its caissons (an average of 110 feet) along with the height of the tower’s structural steel (792 feet) illustrated the potentials of nineteenth-century construction methods taken to extremes. The technological advances represented by the mechanical and electrical systems of the Woolworth’s interior, however, stood out as unique to the twentieth century. These included eighty-seven miles of electric wiring, an independently functioning power plant, and, importantly, state-of-the-art elevators, some of which reached speeds of seven hundred feet per minute. They combined to create the most technologically advanced interior of the day.

As skyscrapers grew taller in the late twentieth century, they also grew much lighter in structural weight, with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s John Hancock Center followed by the Sears Tower (1969-74) epitomizing the quest for height and lightness. Given the importance of comfort to the tenants housed at the increasing heights, engineers devised mechanical systems of air conditioning, the first of which appeared in the Milan Building, San Antonio, in 1928. Exceedingly tall structures also swayed, creating a sense of disorientation in their upper stories, leading William LeMessurier to conceive the first “tuned mass damper” for the top of the Citicorp Building, New York in 1977. By the mid-1990s, engineers had proposed systems of elevators with speeds up to 2,400 feet per minute, as demonstrated at the seventy-story Landmark Tower, Yokohama, Japan. Petroski concludes that today, all large buildings are “complex systems comprising many subsystems” and that the most successful buildings, skyscrapers among them, triumph as engineering designs when the interactions among those systems have been properly anticipated in advance by the many types of engineers who are by necessity involved with such projects (p. 213).

Peters’s Building the Nineteenth Century shares Petroski’s themes of assessing key works, charting the evolution of engineering thought, and highlighting the significance of a particular social or political context. But Peters’s book is distinguished, nonetheless, for its panoramic sweep, particularly in view of the powerful economic and societal forces inciting engineers and builders to think in innovative ways about the efficient completion of large-scale projects. In doing so, Peters highlights the industrialization of the western world; the invention of new means of transportation and communication such as canals, railways, and the telegraph, which sped the distribution of products and ideas; urbanization; and the rise of the concept of progress as a driving force and positivistic ideology. Given such far-reaching material changes, “building under pressure” became the norm. Engineers and builders employed the older materials of construction, among them wood, in new ways, utilizing inventive techniques of standardization and rationalization. They adopted newer materials such as iron from the machine industry and developed them as systems of components for building. The structural possibilities afforded by reinforced concrete radically changed the art of construction. All facilitated a new economy of speed in the completion of large-scale projects.

Regardless of the innovations, builders did not realize their all-important criteria of economy and speed in a clear, straightforward fashion. Instead, they confronted every step along the way a complex and hindering tangle of thorny political and social issues. In particular, they faced the formidable resistance of construction workers, which is not surprising, given the powerful and at times sinister objectives of time- and money-driven capitalists and their engineers. The cold calculations of Wellington A. Purdon, as Peters notes, underscored the darker side of the new industrial economy: “Wherever builders lacked the organizational or technological means to improve their output they faced a grotesque equation between speed and human life” (p. 92). Such a mind-set was not lost on Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank Bunker Gilbreth, who in subordinating the worker to the overarching aims of rationalization and speed, took little account of that worker’s commitment to quality and craftsmanship. Still, they drew the line at sacrificing human lives.

Peters uses what he calls “representative” case studies, comprising tunnels, bridges, exhibition structures, and canals—most of which engineers designed on an unprecedented scale—to shine a light on “how builders think” (p. xi). More specifically, the case studies illustrate when, where, and how key conceptual breakthroughs occurred, thus advancing a particular component of the building process. London’s Thames Tunnel (1825-1843), for example, had little relation to the existing traffic network, took eighteen years to construct, suffered from a haphazardly organized construction site, and showed little in the way of invention other than the christening of Marc Brunel’s recently patented tunneling shield. The Mount Cenis Tunnel (1860-1871), by contrast, planned and executed by Joseph Medail and Jean-Marie Henri Maus as the first major transalpine tunnel to connect the valleys of French Savoy with upper Italy and as a key link in a vast rail network, demonstrated the potentials of previously untried technologies and new methods of organizational thinking. Medail and Maus mechanized the site for fully eight out of the eleven years it took to construct the project, developing a “modern process in some aspects,” which deployed the new pneumatic technology to power drills and the fans that ventilated the project’s workface, in addition to inaugurating communication on-site by telegraph, with the aim of improving the efficiency of the workforce (p. 159). Consequently, the Mount Cenis Tunnel marked a “mature form of technological thinking,” which the French deservedly celebrated at its opening in 1871 (p. xiii).

In his analysis of the Conway and the Britannia bridge projects (1845-1850), both of which formed integral parts of a rail network and, consequently, fell under the constant pressure of a time- and money-driven deadline, Peters explains the appearance of “the first glimmer of a critical path method” in construction (p. 161). For the Britannia Bridge, Robert Stephenson spent extra effort erecting taller piers in a strategy to potentially save time later, just in case their additional height might be needed to support new suspension chains. In a similar fashion, the Suez Canal of 1855-1880 served as a “catalyst” for what would eventually become full-fledged “matrix thinking.” The French contractor Borel Lavalley et Compagnie acquired the manufacturing companies it needed to produce on its own the project’s excavators, cranes, tractors, and barges, that is, everything it required to mechanize the construction process outright. That process, nonetheless, continued with the old and new equipment existing side by side; the contractor never organized the site systematically. Instead, it viewed construction simply as “a linear concatenation of events,” not as a true “matrix of parallel occurrences through which a builder had to weave a critical path” (p. 197).

With the Crystal Palace (1851) and the Eiffel Tower (1889), Peters explains how builders developed the concept of “system,” a major breakthrough in the process of construction. For the Crystal Palace, the railway contractors Fox & Henderson industrially manufactured a few generalized components, which they combined using simplified connections into several subassemblies. This, in turn, inspired a new “procedural thinking” about construction, that is, a rational, linear process in which the work site became an assembly line. From the standpoint of engineering design, however, the Crystal Palace lacked the requisite expansion joints, given its gargantuan length. It also lacked the proper stiffness, despite the addition of a few diagonal braces. As Peters puts it, the structure “would have failed under a mild breeze” (p. 232). Instead, it took Gustav Eiffel and his design for the Eiffel Tower to thoroughly transform the art of building into a process of assembling. Eiffel developed a catalog of wrought iron parts, including nine basic connection gussets and connection rules, the latter of which served as the generators of an “open system,” that is, a system that he might have deployed to design any iron structure.

In concluding Building the Nineteenth Century with the Panama Canal, Peters illustrates how the nineteenth century’s many discrete but important developments in the building process converged, marking a great turning point in the history of construction. Peters makes note of the smaller-scaled, reinforced concrete Langwies Viaduct (1912-1914) in the Schanfigg Valley, Switzerland as a prelude to the canal. For the first time, the viaduct’s designer, Eduard Züblin, used a bar graph to organize the entire time- and money-driven process, allowing him to track how far each contractor had advanced by a specific date in relation to the others. The much larger Panama Canal project (1881-1889, 1904-1913) succeeded as the more decisive summation of the same process—given that its builder, the West Point–educated military engineer George Washington Goethals, employed a “military strategy” for the first time, taking Züblin’s type of organizational thinking to an entirely new, if not astonishing, scale.

In Panama, Goethals faced completing the project initiated in 1879 by Ferdinand de Lessups, the French diplomat, financier, and “internationally acknowledged expert in oceanic canals” (p. 299). Lessups, although not an engineer, had achieved remarkable success in constructing the Suez Canal; he planned to deploy machinery and methods from that earlier project. But with little overall coordination at the site in Panama and a gross mismanagement of funds, Lessups failed, leaving the project bankrupt in 1889. Nine years later, France sold the concession for the canal to the United States. That is when U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Goethals—after two American engineers faltered in managing the project. He also put the entire site under martial law. Goethals, then, was free to lay out his “military strategy” for construction, deploying a simplified chain of command and keeping the day-to-day logistics of decision-making under his own autocratic control.

Two segments of the Panama Canal project, the Culebra Cut and the Gatun Locks, presented especially challenging problems in the logistics of managing construction. At Culebra, the canal crossed the difficult terrain of the continental divide, requiring gargantuan steam shovels for excavation, a total of sixty-eight at the peak of the project, which engineers kept running around the clock through a program of fueling, servicing, and repair at night. Each day, ninety-five trains comprising twenty cars each carried the spoil away. At the Gatun Locks, workers poured a record-setting 15.3 million tons of concrete within a single year, which in turn effected a new level of speed in the transportation of materials, via the use of large clamshell buckets traveling along double cableways. Both segments of the canal benefited from Goethals and his engineers’ knowledge of Frank Bunker Gilbreth’s Field System (1906) and Concrete System (1908) in addition to their mastery, preceding Henry Ford, of new advances in semi-automated assembly line manufacture.

Goethals’s leadership at the Panama Canal—the largest, most complex project of its kind—completed the transformation of the building process from an unplanned interlude between a project’s design and completion into a mature, complex, reasoned, and now necessary profession in its own right. That is why today, Peters emphasizes, we no longer merely “construct” projects but rather assemble them as systems in accordance with processes strategically planned in advance.

Given its great breadth, Peters’s Building the Nineteenth Century provides an excellent intellectual framework within which to consider the work of Saint, Bruegmann, Kranakis, and Petroski, all of which when combined as a body of thought shed a wholly new light on the large-scale projects of architects, engineers, and builders. Collectively, these authors not only expand our understanding of such projects but also explain their power as catalysts in shaping cities and entire geographic regions. They also illustrate the many creative forces at work in the production of the modern built environment, from the design of a singular bridge or skyscraper to the vast systems of infrastructure supporting urban transportation or water supply and removal. For this reason, they cannot fail to provide the urban historian with a richer perspective on that environment, even though their subject is not, technically speaking, urban design or city planning.