TWENTIETH CENTURY ENGINEERING the Musuem of Modern Art N.Y.

TWENTIETH CENTURY ENGINEERING the Musuem of Modern Art New York Boek in stoeptegelformaat met kaft met illustratie met witte letteropdruk in goede conditie; 101 pagina's met 139 zwart/wit foto's; © 1964 by The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street New York, N.Y. 10019 Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 64-24100 Designed by Herbert Migdoll Printed in the U.S.A. by Pictorial Offset Corporation Cover: CNIT exhibition hall, Paris Photo by Jean Biaugeaud Board of Trustees David Rockefeller, Chairman of the Board Henry Alien Moe, Vice-Chairman William S. Paley, Vice-Chairman Mrs. Bliss Parkinson, Vice-Chairman William A. M. Burden, President James Thrall Soby, Vice-President Ralph F. Colin, Vice-President Gardner Cowles, Vice-President tngineering is defined by the dictionary as an applied science. Concerned originally with the management of engines, it is now understood as the manipulation of physical forces to make structures and machines. Besides bridges, dams and stadia, and enclosures for storage, work, and public assembly, engineering at architectural scale ranges from such quasi-mechanical objects as radar and telescope installationsto highways, earth terracing, and artificial islands. Although engineering has been regarded as an art in the craft sense only, in the twentieth century the art of architecture has sought to emulate its rigorous efficiency and the boldness of its forms. Architects are not alone in finding work by engineers to be beautiful. Dams and bridges, and certain kinds of large utilitarian buildings, are readily admired by a public responsive to effects of monumental scale. In the twenties and thirties dams, bridges and grain silos were taken as proof of our civilization's ability to match the grandeur of Egyptian pyramids and Roman viaducts. Like the great works of the past our own monumental structures usually employ geometric shapes at enormous scale, and are tree ot superfluous detail. Engineers were acknowledged to be not only great builders but even great architects, the beauty of their work being understood as the product of rational analysis and the solution of "problems". As architecture itself was directed toward the solving of problems (more often of function rather than structure) it became increasingly ditficult to distinguish between the engineer's craft and the architect's art. So long as we assume that pure forms are beautiful; that purity of form is proof of rational thought; and that rational thought is desirable, the rational work of the engineer will seem to us inherently beautiful. What role is left for the architect? Ruskin defined architecture as the decoration of structure. For Le Corbusier it is the play of forms in the light, and decoration is irrelevant. Frank Lloyd Wright regarded space as the truth of architecture, the forms that enclose and define space being subordinate, at least theoretically, to the revelation of what is intangible and essentially mysterious. Mies van der Rone, although his earliest work was largely dependent on the manipulation of space, has rejected the primacy of such concepts and now sees architecture as structure alone. It is this post-World War II phase of Mies's work that has brought architecture closer to engineering than ever before. That Mies uses such semi-structural elements as mullions for decorative purposes does not invalidate the consistency of his approach, but he has opened the way for others to restate Ruskin's depressing conelusion: that architecture after all is only the decoration of structure. And from unnecessary decoration it is a short step to unnecessary structure. Architecture in the United States, with or without the aid of rational argument, is moving toward the elaboration of form for its own sake. As buildings become heavier and more sculptural, structure again tends to be merely one of several sources for formal invention. Under these circumstances the craft of the engineer has become in its own way "artistic", and structural complications disproportionate to the actual problem are often praised for their "imaginative" daring. Nevertheless, engineer is still rightly regarded as a particularly responsible kind of technician, a role the architect often appears to disdain. Engineering offers encouragement, or at least solace, but for the wrong reasons. The objectivity of engineering is a myth. All things being equal there would be as many styles of engineering as there are engineers, but ot course all things are seldom equal. It is true that a concrete dam inserted into a rock canyon in Iran will not look like a concrete dam built in the Tennessee Valley, because differences in site conditions, in the kinds of tools economically feasible in each place, and in the problems dams are designed to solve—including problems of social engineering— are bound to result in visible differences of form. But even projects designed under equal conditions still reveal important formal differences, and these can only be attributed to the fact that engineers do have subjective, it not actually arbitrary, preferences for certain kinds of shapes. The more these subjective preferences are concealed, the more carefully they are linked in a chain of rational decisions, the more decisive are their effects. Differences in engineering style may be compared to attitudes toward craft. The engineer may take pride in the single-minded consistency of his solution to diverse and often contradictory problems, expecting us to share his satisfaction in elegance, lightness, and the apparent ease with which difficulties are overcome. The bridges and buildings of Robert Maillart, for example, are perhaps for the twentieth century the supreme example of this aristocratic taste. Alternatively, the engineer may glory in the sheer effort his work involves, and by exaggerating the importance of details he may achieve that operatic expressiveness his audience will want to applaud. Extravagance for its own sake is not always as gratifying in engineering as it is in music, and yet the heroic forms and quasi-structural embellishments sometimes used to solve relatively simple problems by the great Italian engineer, Pier Luig Nervi, do indeed move us by their exuberant virtuosity. If engineering may be regarded as a performing art, or entertainment, we are offered a choice between the magician whose sleight of hand discloses neither preparation nor effort but appears to bring about miracles; and the weight-lifter whose rippling muscles and disturbing grunts allow us to share the joy of successful effort. Indifferent to the lessons of psychology, architects and engineers habitually mark out for themselves separate and supposedly contrasting roles. The architect sees the engineer as a clumsy technician; the engineer sees the architect as a willful esthete. In this argument both sides are wrong: the engineer is no less a willful esthete than the architect. A more usetul debate tor the development ot architecture in what is left of this century would have to do with the relevance of those forms engineers give us. For the engineer working to enclose space, the most challenging problem is the clear span at giant scale. The vaults or domes that usually solve this problem most economically seldom answer the formal requirements architects are likely to have in mind: how will the roof be connected visually to the ground; how will entrances be made; how will glazing be incorporated without concealing or distorting the essential structure; how will accessory buildings be related to the initial concept; and how will the structure relate to its environment. If architects have not always succeeded in providing satisfactory solutions to these problems, engineers have too often been altogether indifferent to them. The majority of buildings in this exhibition are defaced by amateurish architectural details, some of them so gross as to make an appreciation of structural merit an act of charity. Many of these problems arise from the enthusiasm of architects and engineers alike for forms unsuited to human use. The shape of a cooling tower such as Carling (19) for example, does not really lend itself to the functions of an auditorium, even when Le Corbusier himself adapts it for the Assembly Hall at Chandigarh. The Carling towers illustrate very well those aspects of engineering to which architects are so susceptible. Mathematically graceful curves and heroic scale are sufficient to overcome any hesitation we may feel about the cluttered design of the base. Even this esthetically unconvincing detail contributes to Carling's deliberate, purposeful grandeur. Small houses nearby, unhappily dwarfed, must finally seem to us a petty distraction, and we may imagine the landscape's equilibrium restored removal of the houses rather than the towers. It is this conflict between the tradtional scale of houses and even cities, and the new scale of industrial buildings, highways, and dams that we have not yet resolved. The problems engineers solve cut across economics, politics, science and art, affectine the lives of all men—on this planet now and eventually somewhere else as well. Even engineering's worst offenses—superhighways, for example—are often intrinsically beautiful and suggest answers to some of the problems they now help to perpetuate. Engineering is among the most rewarding of the arts not only because - it produces individual masterpieces but because it is an art grounded in social responsibiiity. Today we lack the political and economic apparatus that would facilitate a truly responsible use of our technology. But it may be that a more skiliful and -humane use of engineering depends on a more knowledgeable response to its poetry. Arthur Drexier Instruments Buildings Towers Columns and Roofs Vaults and Domes Bridges Roads Tunnels Dams Spillways Earthworks