My undergraduate degree is in mechanical engineering. One summer I got hired as an HVAC engineer for a prestigious New York architect called Swankee, Hayden & Connell. Swanky indeed, located on Park Avenue and a few floors down from the offices of SOM (Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill for you hopelessly uncouth types). HVAC. Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning. Could you imagine anything more boring? Anyway the pay was just fine.

I soon started poking around the office and chatting with some of the young architects who it turns out are paid next to nothing for some bizzare reason I still don’t understand. Anyway, I found what they were doing vastly more interesting then the mind numbing details of duct work specification and started spending more and more time with them. One architect I became friends with had attended the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. He had been a student of Louis Kahn and described to me how Kahn packed Penn lecture halls with rapt, adoring students and held them spellbound for hours. I’ll have more to say about Louis Kahn in a future post.

The School of Fine Arts publishs a quarterly called VIA. My architect friend showed me one volume entitled Structures Implicit and Explicit and a doorway opened in my brain. For the first time I saw words on a page that began to answer the nagging questions I had about how to reconsile and better understand the profound impact design and engineering has on me.

One piece in particular by David P. Billington entitled Meaning in Maillart was particularly illuminating. David P. Billington is Professor of Civil Engineering at Princeton University. He is in a class by himself as a writer on the art of engineering. Meaning in Maillart, on the work of 20th century Swiss master bridge engineer Robert Maillart, is an elegant synthesis of engineering, asthetic, and historical analysis.

So why “The Salgina Crossing”? Well, the jewel in Robert Maillart’s crown is the incomparable Salginatobel bridge. Billington introduces the Salginatobel bridge in the prologue to the wonderful Robert Maillart’s Bridges. The prologue is entitled The Salgina Crossing. Here is a passage:

From Shiers a single-lane road winds up to the mountain village of Fajauna. Few signs of civilization can be seen above the high Alpine meadows as the road curves up the southern slope of the Ratikon range that separates Switzerland from Austria. After one curve, a small white form appears through the trees. After a few more curves, it comes into full view – a bridge, connecting two mountains over a wide ravine. To laymen its form is unclear at first and then distinguishable as a bridge. To knowledgeable engineers, however, it is not only immediately clear, it is also the reason for the pilgramage. Here is one of the most beautiful examples of pure twentieth-century structure. But is also complex and, even to the skilled engineer, an object of mystery and wonder.

This bridge, the Salginatobel, was completed in 1930 to serve the population of Schuders, an Alpine community of less than 50 people; yet it was the focus of the first art museum exhibition ever devoted to pure engineering, held at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1947. Designed by a highly trained engineer whose highest school grade was in differential equations, the bridge calculations employed elementary mathematics with no calculus at all. Expressing in its form one of the simplest of all technical ideas, it nevertheless had practically no precedent. Arising in a setting of almost primitive mountain simplicity, the bridge almost immediately became an important force in the most sophisticated circles of avant-garde intellectuals. Considered now to be a work of art, the design was originally chosen because it was the least expensive proposal.

This work of pure engineering strikes laymen and engineers alike as something radically new and prototypical of the twentieth century. It’s designer, Robert Maillart, created in the wilderness a bridge of such extraordinary beauty that its materiel, reinforced concrete, became the medium for a legitimate style in its own right.