Staging the Tragedy of Time: Paul Cret and the Delaware River Bridge Author(s): Jonathan E. Farnham Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Sep., 1998), pp. 258- 279 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/991346 . Accessed: 02/08/2013 18:04 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]. University of California Press and Society of Architectural Historians are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 132.216.1.39 on Fri, 2 Aug 2013 18:04:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Staging the Tragedy of Time PaulCret and the Delaware River Bridge within these which in the United Statesin the JONATHAN E. FARNHAM,Princeton University practices, began late nineteenth century, architectsencountered new bound- On 6 January 1925 in the Rose Garden of the Bellevue- ariesas well as new notions of boundedness.4By the beginning Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, at the Delaware River of the modern period, the central problem of American Bridge (DRB) Third Annual Staff Dinner, Paul Cret, the architecturewas conceived in terms of links and limits;it was a Beaux-Arts-educated French architect and professor of design problem of bridging. at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, sat The prominent role of bridges in both the theory and at Table 16 with his collaborators, engineers Montgomery historiographyof the Europeanarchitectural avant-garde dur- Case, Clement Chase, Allston Dana, and Leon Moisseiff (Fig- ing this period is well known. For example, Le Corbusier's ure 1).1 During the evening the celebrants sang several songs essay "Esth6tiquede l'ing6nieur architecture"of 1921, re- from the "Third Annual Staff Dinner Song Book," including printed as the firstchapter of Versune architecture (1923), opens two specifically about the bridge. As might be expected of any with an image of Alexandre GustaveEiffel's Pont de Garabit eulogy of a bridge, the lyrics to "Song 23" evoked notions of (1884) (Figure 2). The bridge is presented as the apex of unity and connection: nineteenth-centuryFrench engineering and the herald of a new tradition. For Le Corbusier,the modern iron or steel There'sa long, long Bridgea-stretching across the RiverDelaware bridge was the foremost emblem of "The direct And unites the StateofJersey with our Pennsylvaniafair. technology. and immediate of the "mark[ed] As a monument of glory,of greatendeavor and of fame expression progress," bridge out the of civilization"and the toward a It willalways be connectedwith the BRIDGE COMMISSION's name. stages pointed way new architecture.5Like Le Corbusier's manifesto, Sigfried As the voices of architect and engineers rose in concert from Giedion'soperative history, Space, Time and Architecture (1941), Table 16, did Cret hear the harmonious bridging of antino- particularlyhis chapteron "The Schismbetween Architecture mies that he strove to concretize in his numerous collaborative and Technology,"turns on the bridge.6Giedion's story of the bridge designs? genesis of modern architectureis a tale of bridges and bridg- Paul Cret's designs for the DRB, the first of his many bridge ing that extended from AbrahamDarby's iron bridge at Coal- projects, as well as his theoretical writing on bridges and brookdale of 1779, the site of the separation of architecture bridging, provide a unique vantage point from which to survey and engineering, to Robert Maillart'sreinforced concrete the threshold between architecture and engineering.2 At the bridge at Tavanasaof 1905, the point of their reconciliation. end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth Claimingthat construction,"the subconsciousnessof architec- centuries, the relationship between architecture and engineer- ture," assumed precedence during the nineteenth century, ing was inextricably tied to changing conceptions of history, Giedion argued that a truly modern architecture emerged temporality, and modernity.3 While engineers and their tech- only when architecturereconnected, through engineering, to nological productions participated in defining the predomi- the present.7The embodiment of connection, the bridge was nant conception of temporality through the powerful notion championed as both the site and the metaphorfor this reunifi- of progress, architects, who lacked a clear link with progress, cation.8 were unsure of their relationship to time. Furthermore, these Like the European modernists, American engineers and uncertainties about the connections to both engineering and their apologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth emerging conceptions of modernity intertwined with more centuries asserted that bridges, unlike architecture,mirrored general apprehensions about shifting notions of threshold and also marked the progress of human civilization.They and boundary. With the rapid professionalization of both articulated a relationship between building and time that architectural and engineering practices and specialization situatedthe bridge at the nexus of a series of discourseson the 258 JSAH / 57:3, SEPTEMBER1998 This content downloaded from 132.216.1.39 on Fri, 2 Aug 2013 18:04:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FIGURE1: Ralph Modjeski, chief engineer, Delaware RiverBridge between Philadelphia,Pennsylvania, and Camden, New Jersey, 1920-1927. Renderingby PaulCret, 1921 tween architecture and the present, and that the bridge of- fered the possibility of a pure, undifferentiated union. Refut- ing the commonly held view that architecture would become truly modern when it shed the burden of history, when it escaped the past and embraced the present, Cret contested the assumption that bridging inherently produces identity. In Towardsa New Architecture,Le Corbusier declaimed: "Let us listen to the counsel of American engineers."" In 1928, in an of the same title, architect Claude a consul- Viaducde Garabit(M. EzrEns) essay Bragdon, REVUEDE L'ANOtE tant on numerous bridge designs, likewise declared: "The DEL'INGtNIEUR engineer, forced to abandon all aid and comfort from the Old ESTHtTIOUE World and the past by reason of the newness of his material ARCHITECTURE (steel) and the novelty of his problems, and therefore subject Par LE CORBUSIER-SAUGNIER to no educational malpractice, has succeeded where the archi- FIGURE2: Le Corbusier, introductory page to the essay entitled "Esthetique de tect, taught only to lie and to steal, has failed."'12By contrast, l'ingenieur-architecture,"L'Esprit nouveau (November 1921). Included is a photo- Paul Cret urged architects "toward a new classicism" that, in graph of Alexandre Gustave Eiffel'sPont de Garabit across the in France, fostering a link between but also preserving the integrity of 1884. Truy.re novelty and tradition, extolled the productive nature of bridg- ing.13 Portraying architects as unaware of advances in technologi- physics and metaphysics of construction. Speaking for engi- cal culture and therefore disengaged from the present had neers, the mathematician, literary critic, and historian of become commonplace in engineering discourse by 1925 when science and technology Archibald Henderson declared: Cret began to call for a "new classicism." As early as 1869, bridge engineer Alfred Pancoast Boller had observed: "It Nowhere in the material world do we find so significant, so continu- would be an interesting, and perhaps a profitable speculation, ously enthralling an image as that of a bridge. From the dawn of to inquire in what manner the separation of the professions creation the bridge was-coeval with man, contemporaneous with the may have produced what is popularly called the 'degeneracy of individual, as with the life of the race, reflecting in all its minute and modern architecture.' "14Seemingly unable to develop a single countless changes the minute and countless changes of human civiliza- style for the modern age, architects wasted time proliferating tion. ... The whole meaning of progress is summed up in the bridge-at "degenerate" revival styles. Architecture, according to this once a daring symbol and a splendid reality.9 view, had slipped out of joint with time. By the second half of So confident were American engineers that one proclaimed: the nineteenth century, it had become anachronistic. "The formal title of the man who exerts a greater influence in "Is not our new leader an engineer, rather than a philolo- the civilized world at the present time than any other human gist or an antiquary?" asked Calvin Woodward, dean of the being.., .is The Supreme Bridge-Builder,-Pontifex Maxi- School of Engineering at George Washington University, in mus.10 1895.15 He continued, "The engineer is by nature an icono- Questioning these prevailing conceptions of the interrela- clast. He has small respect for the traditions. He snaps his tionship of bridges, architecture, engineering, and time, Paul fingers in scorn at all whose chief pride and glory lies in their Cret challenged two fundamental claims: that the schism submission to the 'tyranny of the ancients.' He cares less for between architecture and engineering betrayed a breach be- what he has been than what he may be. His triumphs, his FARNHAM:PAUL CRET 259 This content downloaded from 132.216.1.39 on Fri, 2 Aug 2013 18:04:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions masterpieces, his heroes, his golden age, are all in the future. BATTLING FOR THE BRIDGEHEAD:ARCHITECTS, He walks forward, with his face to the front; not backward, with ENGINEERS,AND PROFESSIONALBOUNDARIES his face to the past.