Volume 54, Number 8 · May 10, 2007
Genius in Concrete
By Witold Rybczynski
Ove Arup: Masterbuilder of the Twentieth Century
by Peter Jones
Yale University Press, 364 pp., $40.00
Behind every great architect there is a great engineer. Or more accurately, behind every great modern architect there is a great engineer, for until the twentieth century, the two professions were one. The accomplished—and largely anonymous—medieval master-masons who built the Gothic cathedrals, for example, were responsible equally for ornament and structure, which may be why it is often hard to distinguish between the two. The pointed arch, as the British scholar John Summerson observed years ago, is as much fanciful as functional, and what appear to be structural ribs in the stone ceilings are strictly decorative. On the other hand, window tracery made of lead and iron, while forming a pretty pattern, effectively resists gravity and wind forces; and although the stone piers that line the nave are designed to resemble bundled columns—a visual conceit—their mass is needed to support the great weight of the wall and the stone ceiling above. In a medieval cathedral, architecture and engineering are crucially combined.
Review, 4005 words
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