Architect and Engineer

By Micah Jacobson



A book I have been reading for my thesis research is Architect and Engineer: A Study in Sibling Rivalry by Andrew Saint. I wanted to share a few interesting things about this book to anyone interested in architecture and engineering.
This book by Andrew Saint is a work dedicated to exploring the relationship of the architect and the engineer, primarily the structural engineer. He focuses the book into five chapters. The first chapter outlines France in 1600’s and the role of the two professions. He talks about Vauban, the famous fort builder and states that though he is often thought of as an engineer he would have considered himself a soldier and notes that “His greatness as an engineer lies in process, not in any single act, art or technique.
Saints states “Not that architect and engineer have ever been wholly indistinguishable. Anyone studying the relationship between the two will soon conclude that though the terms and the jobs are hard to prise apart, they correspond to different facts of the human personality.” He notes that the architect was often thought of as someone who imposed ideas upon buildings and was familiar with Vitruvian values and art. The engineer was thought of as someone who was “clever with machines, able to harness, versed above all in the techniques of war.” Many of the structures he outlines are forts, castles bridges and French infrastructure
He speaks of Britain in the late 1600’s making specific mention of Christopher Wren. Wren was not only an architect, but he may be more precisely described as a mathematical scientist. Wren wrote “that the generality of our late architects dwell so much upon this ornamental, and so slightly pass over the geometrical, which is the most essential part of architecture.” It describes Wren as being more of an engineer than an architect and “preferred the display of his mechanical skill to the expression of his artistic feelings.” The author defines engineering here “in terms of skills, not tasks.” Wren mostly did religious and governmental, requiring strong aesthetics and symbolism, thus creating a remembrance of him as an architect.
The author focuses an entire chapter on each of the building materials; iron and concrete. These two materials were very fundamental to modernism and modernization. Iron developments include railways, bridges, and building structural elements. Some of the early developments were not pushed by architects or engineers but by fabricators and inventors. The first iron bridge, built at coalbrookdale in 1777, was not structurally engineered as we think of it today or mathematical calculations, but by the drive of the ironmasters. Saint notes “That the earliest extant iron architecture was promoted from the supply side is confirmed by its most famous symbol, the Iron Bridge at Coalbrookdale.” He adds “Bridges were the aspect of early iron architecture to which specialist engineers contributed the most.”
The first use of iron used as an exposed structural element for a building is in 1692, on the House of Commons building in England. Wren was the designer of this job, and in the effort to improve site lines iron columns were used to accompany the wood carved Corinthian capitals by Grinling Gibbons. Some early uses of interior uses of exposed structural iron are the Drury Lane Theatre Royal (1786) and St. George’s Church in Everton Liverpool (1813). The church used an all masonry exterior with all iron structural members for the interior. Another example Saint uses is the famous Crystal Palace. Iron was also used as ties or chains in gothic masonry structure to hold the large stone together and in place (much like we use rebar in concrete today). A place were iron was exemplified is in the theater. There were large auditoriums that required long spans to cover the audience. The Palais-Royal Opera House in Paris was a good example of this. It used several shallow iron trusses, linked together to span 25 meters over the auditorium.
Andrew Saint covers the history of concrete and motor, from the use of Pozzalane, as advised by Vitruvius, through the use of lime, sand and gravel mix, now called lime-concrete, to the use of Portland cement concrete used in modern buildings. He points out that in the 1830’s there was not only in-situ concrete, but pre-cast and factory made concrete. These factory made concrete forms usually came in blocks, replicating in process the widely used masonry method of buildings. In-situ or cast in place concrete is a very different building technique. It forms a solid, continuous, rigid, load baring wall that can be formed and then poured into place. In-situ concrete can be used to make large monolithic structures that are rigid throughout all joints. A unique use for concrete was used in a pair of semi-detached houses designed by Ernist Newton in 1882. These houses implored the use of concrete slabs hung on timber frames. Concrete was also used for aqueducts and for bridge applications.
Adding functionality to concrete construction was the addition of iron and later steel to add to its tensile strength. The advancing of cement mixtures and substitution if steel for iron made the reinforced concrete building method to take off. The Romans actually used a metal plate and stone lintel to span a long distance, though the metal was on the compression side, not tension. Concrete was a product of material and structural engineers, but as Saint points out “As for architecture, any new building technology usually starts off by abasing itself to the discipline’s traditions and fashions.” This was the case with concrete Hennebique, a developer of concrete frame structures and systems, wooed architects, showing them that his concrete could be used to anything imaginable. And so reinforced concrete was adopted by the architect as one of his many tools for design.
The fourth chapter in the book is about the bridge. In reference of The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric, a novel about Bosnia’s history over four hundred years, Saint explains:
Here is an engineer’s story: about courage, effort and technique; about the benefits a magnificent and useful monument can confer across generation; about amazement at its construction and pride in its endurance. But there is another side to Andric’s presentation of the Drina Bridge. At its crown, the width is corbelled out over the central pier to make a place called the ‘kapia’ – an open terrace, with steps, benches and a commemorative inscription in Turkish. Resting points of this kind, sometimes marked by monuments, were not rare at the midpoint of old bridges. On the kapia take place major and minor events in the course of the novel, as of Viseguard’s history: courtships and executions, eating and drinking, deals, arguments, conspiracies, rituals of welcome and farewell, ogling and idling. In a community riven between mosque and church, the kepia and by extension the bridge itself become the symbolic centre of the town, the focus of activity, memory and cohesion.
The author speaks of the different types of bridges; masonry, suspension, steel, concrete, and compression. All of these types of bridges were conceived by engineers and many of their technologies, materials and construction methods were carried over into architecture. One good example Saint points out is the structural engineer Robert Maillart. He designed many bridges in the early 1900’s. His bridges could be describes a minimalistic, taking the bridge down to the bare bones. He was known for the reinforced concrete arches he designed in his structures. Saint explains that “his early concrete bridges owed as much to imagination as to technique. He ceased to look upon the arch as supporting the deck of the bridge, and thought of the whole as a hinged, hollow box in which all the elements acted together and redundant parts were pared away, to gain the economy and aesthetics alike.” From old cobble stone bridges to new steel bridges such as the Millennium Bridge Andrew Saint points out how the engineering, aesthetics and style have crossed the metaphorical bridge into the architectural realm.
Chapter five explores the collaboration of architects and engineers throughout the twentieth century in Britain and America. He discusses many British examples including the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, works by Ove Arup, engineer, Lubetkin and Tecton, architects and he explores the Sydney opera house by the collaboration of Arup and Jorn Utzon. He then moves on to America and examines SOM, Louis Kahn, Felix Candela (architect and engineer), Earo Saarinen, Frei Otto. The author asks is the engineer subject to the architect, or the inverse, is engineering taking over architecture. He explains that “It is stimulating for engineering as a whole when a few engineers find absorbing enough work on the margins of architecture or the arts to rebrand themselves as artists. But it can hardly be doubted that the present art tendency in engineering reflects a measure of professional anxiety and envy.” He goes on to further explain “Big, emotive public projects like stadia, transport interchanges and bridges deploying structure as their natural medium of expression, are now so widespread that it is sometimes argued that engineering is the true architecture of today.” He concludes the chapter by stating that “they will never meet. Engineering is too focused, too careless of context, too indelicate, ever to be the new architecture. Architecture is too wanton, too irrational, too distractible, to swallow engineering. We need a modest gap.”
The next chapter deals with an essential characteristic that may add to the understanding of these two disciplines: the education of the architect and engineer. He traces this system of education back to French models where a certain number of engineers were needed and required to furnish the country with a contingent every year. The number of artist however did not matter; just the quality of their work. There were, therefore, engineers turned out in masses while artist were limited to a privileged few. He adds that “the teaching of architectural skills has grown up entwined with that of engineering skills.” Saint quotes Dearstyne saying:
The teaching of architecture, or of any other art, for that matter, involves the tediously slow awakening in the students of aesthetic insight; it has relatively little to do with the training of the intellect, however important that may be. It is concerned with the development of wisdom rather than the accumulation of knowledge. Mies van der Rohe had this profound understanding.
Andrew Saint ends with these three questions; were architects and engineers once the same? How and why did architecture and engineering separate? And have the professions been reconciled?
In the middle ages it is not clear if the term architect existed, but it is known that Vitruvius new this term. The building were completed by craftsmen, who had been trained under another. They then graduated from practiced craftsman into ‘master builders.” An architect or engineer “belonged to a growing class of experts who had moved beyond handicraft into more conceptual and managerial activity.” Saint also notes that the term architect or engineer did not describe the individual, but the job he was performing. “If you designed secular or religious buildings and there adornment, you were likely to be called an architect; if you designed forts, walls, towns, ports, canals, or machines for war and peace you were likely to be called an engineer.”
“The division that obtains today between architects and engineers is commonly ascribed to the broad epoch covered by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.” With the advancement of science and mathematics and the use of mathematics, statics and strength to analyze structural problems the engineer became someone primarily concerned with structural design and calculations and the architect stressing the aesthetic and form of a building.
He author then explains the reconciliation of architects and engineers. He states:
By the end of the twentieth century, in buildings of high prestige another change had penetrated the architect-engineer relationship. With the expression of structure a wanting ideal, some architects turned to buildings of flagrant imagery, showiness and daring. How to build such designs was as challenging as and maybe more fun for engineers to sort out than the austere equivalent forty years before. But now the relation between structure and architecture stood in danger of losing some of its dialectical discipline. In an art-obsesses world, the architect had dragged the engineer out of the temple of reason and beguiled him to worship in the temple of art.
Saint ends with a summary of the sibling rivalry or as Ove Arup described it, the marriage of these two disciplines. He states “In the worlds of construction, the eternal dual between architect and engineer plays the same role; the two stand for contrasted facets of our common, riven humanity…. The wayward pleasures of the architect can stand as a compensation for the compunctionless efficiencies of engineering.”