Structural art
Structural art is the name given to works of structural engineering that attain excellence in three measures at once: efficiency, economy and elegance. The concept was defined by Princeton scholar David P. Billington in his 1983 book The Tower and the Bridge, which argued that engineers from Thomas Telford onward created an art form in iron, steel and concrete, working within constraints far stricter than those of architects. A structural artwork must be safe and serviceable, use the minimum material, cost little over its lifetime, and derive its beauty from engineering logic rather than applied decoration. Its greatest practitioners - Robert Maillart, Othmar Ammann, Pier Luigi Nervi, Félix Candela, Fazlur Rahman Khan - designed bridges, towers and shells whose slender, legible forms are admired as sculpture at civic scale.
Defining characteristics
- The load path itself becomes the image: arches, cables and shells read as pure structure
- Minimum material: thin arches, taut cables and shell roofs doing the most with the least
- Clear, legible geometry - parabolas, funicular curves, hyperbolic paraboloids
- Honest materials: concrete, steel and glass left unclad to show how forces travel
- Elegance arising from engineering constraints rather than applied ornament
Key figures
- Robert Maillart (1872-1940) — Swiss engineer who invented the hollow-box arch, as at the Salginatobel Bridge
- Othmar Ammann (1879-1965) — Swiss-American engineer of the George Washington and Verrazzano-Narrows bridges
- Pier Luigi Nervi (1891-1979) — Italian engineer of reinforced-concrete shells and ribbed vaults
- Félix Candela (1910-1997) — Spanish-Mexican master of thin hyperbolic-paraboloid roofs such as Los Manantiales
- Fazlur Rahman Khan (1929-1982) — Bangladeshi-American inventor of the tubular skyscraper structure (John Hancock Center)
Example works
- Salginatobel Bridge — Robert Maillart (1930)
- Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge — Othmar Ammann (1964)
- John Hancock Center — Fazlur Rahman Khan (1969)
Sources
- Structural art - Wikipedia encyclopedia