Structural Imperative and the Origin of New Form

The Johns Hopkins University PressSociety for the History of Technology http://www.jstor.org/stable/3105106 . Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Society for the History of Technology and The Johns Hopkins University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Technology and Culture. http://www.jstor.org StructuralImperative and the Origin of New Form ROBERT MARK AND DAVID P. BILLINGTON Contemporary writing on architecture, following art history, tends to focus on formal analysis where visual ideas dominate the discussion of the origin and meaning of style. Technology is rarely touched upon; and structure, although generally understood as necessary, is hardly seen as a legitimate giver of form, even for large-scale building.' This modern point of view must be understood, at least partly, as a reaction to the ideas of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79), self-trained architect, restorer, archaeologist, and theorist. Mainly on the basis of his extensive practical experience with the restoration of medieval monuments, Viollet-le-Duc compiled a ten-volume encyclopedia, Dic- tionnaire raisonne de l'architecturefranfaise du XIe au XVIe siecle (1854- 68), that remains even today probably the single most important published work on medieval building technology (fig. 1). He also inferred from this experience that many of the principal stylistic elements of the Gothic were originally derived from the demands of the construction process or the laws governing structural forces. Furthermore, he argued, since these laws apply to all building at all times, innovation in visual form springs from appropriate response to structural demands in terms of the materials of construction.2 In this light, he then MR. MARKis professor in the School of Architecture and the Department of Civil Engineering, and MR. BILLINGTONis professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, at Princeton University. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support for these studies provided by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., Foundation. IThe need for structure, however, would not seem to be universally accepted. In the award-winning text by Alberto Perez-G6mez, Architectureand the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), the late-18th-century architects Etienne-Louis Boullee and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux are especially lauded just because their unbuildable "architectural intentions .. did not fit into the new, essentially prosaic world of industrial society" (p. 161). For writers like Perez-G6mez, the process of creative design is only hindered by considering technology. 2Viollet-le-Duc's polemical Entretienssur l'architecture,originally published in Paris in 1863 (vol. 1) and 1872 (vol. 2), was translated into English by Henry Van Brunt as ? 1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/89/3002-001 $0 1.00 300 FIG. 1.-High Gothic construction as illustrated in Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionnaire by his drawing of a portion of the nave of Amiens Cathedral. 302 RobertMark and David P. Billington attempted to demonstrate through new designs how the recently in- troduced metals of his own age might be used to develop a modern style of building. And although Viollet-le-Duc's designs may not have been persuasive in themselves, his writings on structural rationalism, which led Sir John Summerson to characterize him as "the last great theorist in the world of architecture," affected a whole generation of architects.3 He has been credited even with seeding the idea of the metal-framed American skyscraper.4 Rather than searching for elegant structure, many 20th-century designers found a more appealing basis for visual form in merely taking up the notion of a "machine aesthetic," often unrelated to machines but used, for example, to justify adopting Cubist forms in architecture-as when photographs of cylindrical reinforced-concrete grain elevators served as models for new styles of urban dwelling. Indeed, the onset of this new formalism can be marked, in 1923, with the publication of Versune Architectureby the influential Swiss architect Le Corbusier. According to Le Corbusier, the engineer alone could never create beauty; it is only the architect "who by his arrangement of forms realizes an order which is pure creation of the spirit."5 And, as Summerson makes clear in his eccentric yet clever set of essays designed primarily to dispose once and for all of Viollet-le-Duc's the- ories, "[While Viollet-le-Duc's] disciplined, daring, economical, ingen- ious designs [lack] style, . Le Corbusier's architecture was seen to be in the nature of an extension of the abstract painter's vision .... For [Le Corbusier] the obvious solution of a problem, however charm- ing, cannot possibly be the right solution.. Herein is Le Corbusier's poetry-or his wit. He sees the reverse logic of every situation. He Discourseson Architecture(Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1875). The general argument of this work might best be summed up in a brief excerpt from the second volume: "A locomotive ... has its peculiar physiognomy, not the result of caprice, but of necessity. It expresses controlled power; its movements are gentle or terrible, it advances with awful impetuosity or, when at rest, seems to tremble with impatience ... its exterior form is but the expression of its power. A locomotive, then, has style. ... A thing has style when it has the expression appropriate to its use. ... We, who, in the fabrication of our machinery, give to every part the strength and the form which it requires, with nothing superfluous, nothing which does not have a necessary function, in our architecture foolishly accumulate forms and features taken from all sides, the results of contradictory principles, and call this art" (pp. 182, 186). 3John Summerson, Heavenly Mansions (New York, 1963), p. 135. See also Robert Mark, "Robert Willis, Viollet-le-Duc, and the Structural Approach to Gothic Architec- ture," Architectura7 (1977): 52-64. 4Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture(Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 206. 5Le Corbusier, Towardsa New Architecture,trans. F Etchells (New York, 1960), p. 7. StructuralImperative and the Origin of New Form 303 sees that what appears absurd is perhaps more profoundly true than what appears to make sense."6 This negation of technology, we believe, is founded on a false inter- pretation of past monuments as well as a deep misunderstanding of the practice of structural design. In short, the form taken by the buildings that constitute the major architectural monuments of West- ern culture cannot be fully understood without detailed technical study and without recognition that the origin of much new form came directly out of structural rather than formal ideas. Le Corbusier was mistaken in assuming that the singular contribution of engineering to design is the solution of equations (or, more likely today, producing output from a computer) to derive the most efficient "scientific" form.7 Not only is the perception that engineers merely solve equations wrong; it is equally incorrect to argue that elegant form comes solely from architects. The best engineers imagine new forms that are scientific in the sense of being disciplined by the laws of nature, but these forms also reflect their designers' own aesthetic vision. And central to that vision is the engineer's observation of previously built structures that provided a basis for developments in structural form well before the availability of any scientific structural theory. Even today, with so- phisticated computer-analysis methods, such observations are still vital for design. Our technical studies, of both historic and contemporary structure, have provided many insights into how new styles of building were informed by the behavior of previously constructed works. In this article, we shall discuss the effect of prior experience on designs before the Industrial Revolution by relating the Hagia Sophia to earlier large- scale Roman domed buildings, by describing the transition around the year 1200 from six- to four-part vaulting in the high vaults of Gothic churches, and by explaining the design rationale of Wren's dome for St. Paul's Cathedral. Post-Industrial Revolution examples include John Roebling's introduction of diagonal stays in long-span bridges, Robert Maillart's experience with the Aarburg bridge in 1912 that led to his development of a new bridge form, and the seminal ideas of Fazlur Khan on tall-building design. Pantheon and Hagia Sophia Construction of large-scale domed and vaulted monumental buildings was facilitated at the turn of the 1st century A.D. by the Roman 6Summerson (n. 3 above), pp. 154, 189-90. 7Le Corbusier (n. 5 above). 304 RobertMark and David P Billington adoption of cast structural concrete, a construction technique that had been developed over previous centuries but only for utilitarian use or for substructures. The building most representative of this new architecture is the Pantheon, constructed

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