Volume 42, Number 18 · November 16, 1995
Design for Living
By Witold Rybczynski
Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America
by Henry Petroski
Knopf, 479 pp., $30.00
Big bridges are not as big as tunnels, dams, and canals, but they hold a special place in the human imagination. It is not just that the experience of crossing a bridge is memorable (in a different way, so is driving through a tunnel), or that a bridge, like a dam, performs an important economic function. The Suez Canal, over one hundred miles long, is an extraordinary engineering achievement, but it is, after all, a long and deep ditch. Great bridges like the Brooklyn or the Golden Gate, on the other hand, are not merely larger-scale versions of interstate overpasses, they are in a class by themselves.
Review, 3735 words
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