Science & Technology

SIX BRIDGES: he decided to submit plans for New York City’s The Legacy of Othmar H. Ammann. first bridge across the Hudson. His employer and By Darl Rastorfer. Yale Univ. Press. mentor, Hell Gate designer Gustav 188 pp. $39.95 Lindenthal, envisioned a gargantuan structure The destiny of New York City has always of 28 traffic lanes on a half-mile span, support- rested on water. The great harbor gave birth to ed by cables strung from two massive granite tow- the city. The Hudson River provided an inland ers. Lindenthal’s drawings, reproduced in this artery. The Erie Canal connected the Hudson book, show a plan captive to the expansive and to the heartland, guaranteeing the fortunes of the overstuffed instincts of the Victorian Age, an metropolis. Yet if water was a boon to the city’s architectural rendering in which exuberance preeminence as a commercial entrepôt, it was passes over into sheer excess. By contrast, also a bane to physical expansion and eco- Ammann’s design is an avatar of the modern— nomic efficiency. Bounded by water, the city a slim, lithe, liberated Daisy Buchanan against Lindenthal’s dowager empress. The generational divide be- tween old master and brilliant apprentice was unbridgeable. When the recently formed Port Authority of New York and New Jersey chose Ammann’s design, a star was born. The George Washington Bridge is, in Rastorfer’s esti- mation, “the most significant long-span suspension bridge” of the 20th century. Part of its significance is owed to the sleek elegance of the design, and part to parsimoniousness: Workmen attach a cable over the tower saddle on the The Port Authority felt com- Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in July 1963. pelled by the Great Depres- sion to cut back on expenses, so could develop only northward until George it tossed aside Ammann’s plan to dress the Augustus Roebling’s epic bridging of the East steel towers in stone. The serendipitous result River united Brooklyn and New York in 1983. was to heighten “the machined profile and The bridge brought about the demise of transparency of the unfinished construction,” Brooklyn’s independence and the eventual cre- creating a prototype for the stellar feats of ation of Greater New York, a city sprawled bridge building that Ammann would com- across three islands (Manhattan, Staten Island, plete over the next 35 years. and Long Island), with only one borough, the In the style of Ammann’s six bridges—the Bronx, on the mainland of the United States. George Washington, Bayonne, Triborough, Welding this archipelago into a coherent Whitestone, Throgs Neck, and Verrazano— metropolitan whole required a vast and far- Rastorfer’s account of the 20th century’s pontifex flung infrastructure, including tunnels, railway maximus is spare and clean, free of superfluous terminals, and more bridges. Six of the most detail. Rastorfer, curator of the Cooper Hewitt important bridges were designed by a Swiss- Museum exhibition Six Bridges, is equally born engineer named Othmar Ammann, the enlightening about the theory behind the mas- subject of this lucidly written and generously illus- terpieces and about Ammann’s relationship trated book. with Robert Moses, the nonpareil power broker Ammann’s initial break came as inspector of who paved the way for their construction. Six construction on the Hell Gate Bridge. In 1923, Bridges is a long-overdue tribute to perhaps the

Books 139 greatest artist-engineer of all time, and a izing a change as bad unless it amounts to a dis- poignant reminder of the heroic age that pre- aster for all life forms. But his neutrality some- ceded the ethereal sway of cyberspace, an age times lapses, as when he relegates rival expla- when men labored, Prometheus-like, against nations to footnotes or uses toxic eight times in the corporeal constraints of heaven and nature. two pages. He may have found it impossible to —Peter Quinn do otherwise after concluding that the growth imperative responsible for so much environ- SOMETHING NEW UNDER mental degradation is, like the European rabbit THE SUN: and the water hyacinth, all-consuming and all- An Environmental History destructive. of the Twentieth-Century World. —Shepard Krech III By J. R. McNeill. Norton. 421 pp. $29.95 THE TRIPLE HELIX. In my youth in the 1950s, the Chesapeake Bay By Richard Lewontin. Harvard Univ. teemed with life. In summer we swam and Press. 136 pp. $22.95 fished in its clear, brackish waters. In winter we At least since Descartes described the visible watched in awe as migrating ducks filled the world as “merely a machine in which there was evening sky and poured into the bay. Today, nothing at all to consider except the shapes and though, the ducks are nearly gone, and the motions of its parts,” metaphor has played a brown waters are hostile to eelgrass, blue crabs, central role in scientific understanding. We oysters, fish, and humans. Yet even in the think of our brains as computers, or we refer to 1950s, people reminisced about an earlier gold- the human genome as the master blueprint for en age when there had been far more ducks. the species. Lewontin, a professor of evolution Do such anecdotes represent yearning for and zoology at Harvard University, contends an idealized past or genuine and lasting envi- that metaphors can mislead as well as enlight- ronmental decline? McNeill, a professor of his- en. While conceding that scientific explana- tory at Georgetown University and the author of tions “necessarily involve the use of metaphor- The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An ical language,” he argues that many common Environmental History (1992), would choose terms have outlived their usefulness, especially the latter. In this ambitious and exhaustively in the realm of evolution. researched book (the bibliography lists close to To begin with, he finds fault with use of the a thousand sources), he argues that the 20th word development to describe how an organ- century spawned environmental changes that, ism changes over time. In photography, “the though unintended, were extraordinary in image is already immanent in the exposed film, scope and intensity. and the process of development simply makes Erosion, smog, extinctions, shrinking tropical this latent image apparent.” Some biologists forests, ozone holes, birds suffocating in midair believe that organisms change in a similarly over Mexico City—McNeill has plenty to work preordained fashion: Genes determine the out- with. Individual culprits stalk his landscape, come, while environment, like photographic including the inventor of the harpoon cannon developer, provides nothing more than “a set of and the Shakespeare fanatic who released 160 enabling conditions that allow the genes to starlings in New York City. But the real villains, express themselves.” Scientists who discount as he discusses in the last quarter of the book, are the role of environment in this fashion, he con- more complex: urbanization, migration, popu- tends, are guilty of “bad biology.” lation growth, globalization, and shifts in pre- Darwin’s notion of adaptation does ferred fuels and technologies, among others. account for the influence of environment, His account is not unremittingly gloomy. He but Lewontin believes that it too constitutes notes positive developments, such as smog “an impediment to a real understanding of evo- abatement, forest regeneration, and the return lutionary processes.” The term implies that the of the sensitive salmon to formerly polluted organism adapts to a fixed world—that the waters. He acknowledges the upside of many organism is the variable and the environment environmental changes—eliminating coastal is the constant—whereas the two actually mangroves, for instance, benefits rice farm- affect each other. Humans, for example, pro- ing—and he generally refrains from character- duce a “microclimate”: a layer of higher-den-

140 WQ Summer 2000