David P. Billington

A classic!

After reading this book I wanted to quit work and return to school to study civil engineering. Of course, I made the mistake of mentioning this to my wife, who fell into paroxysms of laughter, saying she had seen some of the stuff I had built at home, and there was no way she would ever go on a bridge that I designed.

Billington discusses the interrelationship of efficiency, economy, and aesthetics and how great engineering works combine all three of these to the exclusion of none. The great designers manage to balance beauty with simplicity and cost. Frankly, I found this book riveting (pun intended, although he really celebrates the use of concrete as opposed to steel) and never fail to look carefully at bridges with a new eye.

… (mer)

An episodic examination of how the agricultural development mission of the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer's concerns with river navigation recombined to produce the great multi-purpose dams of the 1930s, where power generation was a major consideration. This is despite the opposition of private power interests; power generation being the surest way to finance these great structures.

Besides the institutional and economic politics that swirled around the projects chosen for examination, the authors spend almost half of the book on the engineering considerations involved in how these dams were designed and built. The shadow hanging over this effort would appear to be the St. Francis Dam Disaster of 1928 in California, the failure of which discouraged the examination of design approaches that would have been more technological daring and possibly more cost effective; better safe than sorry became the order of the day, despite the extra fiscal outlays incurred.

I could easily have marked this book down for having all the flair of a text book, and I've read my share of dry-as-dirt books that I mostly read to be informed.… (mer)

"The Art of Structural Design" isn't the first book to cover these four heroic Swiss structural engineers. Billington has written previously and extensively on Maillart, and there are good books available on Menn and Isler. What makes it remarkable, however, is the particular angle it takes.

The meat of the book discusses these engineers' major works, from Ammann's George Washington Bridge through to Menn's Sunniberg masterpiece. But throughout, the focus isn't just on what brought these structures to the level of art, but on how the engineers' philosophies blended technology and aesthetics, and on where those philosophies came from in the first place.

There are two chapters on their teachers, Wilhelm Ritter and Pierre Lardy, which make clear the key influence that a good educator can have. My experience is that such people are few and far between, and this is to engineering's great loss. Billington's insightful analysis extends to poring over old lecture notes, and I'd think few intelligent engineering students wouldn't wish that those were their own notes.

As such, this is a book that could do with being far more widely read, both by engineering students and educators. It's well-illustrated throughout, and provides engineers with the aspirational figures so often lacking. Although the technical content is fairly light (with the general reader in mind), there's enough to see how only a synthesis of analytical depth with design flair can lead to the very best structural work.… (mer)