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Reviewed by:
  • Geschichte der Baustatik
  • Tom F. Peters (bio)
Geschichte der Baustatik. By Karl-Eugen Kurrer. Berlin: Wilhelm Ernst and Sohn, 2002. Pp. 540. €89.

"The history of statics is statics itself," claims Karl-Eugen Kurrer, paraphrasing Goethe. In Geschichte der Baustatik, based on a long series of specialized articles and more than two decades of study, Kurrer spreads a host of personalities and their interests before us, weaving them together into a thematic whole. Thought is, of course, inextricably bound to personality and education, and Kurrer demonstrates how engineering thought, far from being abstractly objective, is imbued with the character of the thinkers, their teachers, and their pupils. Personal experience conditions the definition of theoretical problems and their solutions, and this renders theoreticians human and their thoughts part of an ongoing professional discourse.

While constructing this complex edifice, Kurrer proposes a conceptual history of statics that organizes developments and events in a matrix that sweeps from philosophy to practice. Oswald Spengler, Michelangelo, and Galileo all appear; so does Müller-Breslau's aesthetics. Kurrer's narrative is not linear; rather, it reflects the complexity of building, takes the spread of [End Page 664] knowledge into account, and in its scope surpasses previous writing on the history of engineering thought.

The book might have been easier to follow had it been thematically and chronologically constructed throughout in the manner of the chapter on arches, but that would have made it more difficult to meld the biographical, intellectual, professional, and social aspects Kurrer considers important. One issue he does treat chronologically is periodicity. While his definition of periods made up of multiples of quarter centuries is peculiar (as Ekkehard Ramm states in the foreword), and may at first seem arbitrary and positivist in its exclusive progression, it does provide a workable frame of reference in which Kurrer then situates events. The story is that of a successful branch of technological thinking, one that history has vindicated, and this is why it may appear deterministic. There are, of course, other branches that withered, dead ends that might be interesting to pursue in order to highlight the successes. Kurrer mentions suggestive debates between Fritz Stüssi and Bruno Thürlimann (pp. 87-88) andOtto Mohr and Heinrich Müller-Breslau (pp. 262-63), and I hope that he will explore more of these in order to test his thesis further—the Belgian contributions at the beginning of the twentieth century or the North American attempts to develop truss theory in the nineteenth, for instance. But there was more than enough for him to accomplish here, and he wisely chose to concentrate on central European developments.

One question that Kurrer addresses is the definition of technological science. He seeks to discover an inherent logic through which technological thinking and analysis occur and relate it to the mainstream history and philosophy of thought. His thesis is that scientific methodology and technical feasibility are synthesized in technical science. The better the synthesis and the more fully both aspects are taken into account, the more scientific is the technology. Kurrer culls his chief examples from Germany, Switzerland, and Austro-Hungary, all places where a culturally specific mix of theory and practice evolved in the nineteenth century.

We can thus understand Kurrer's study as an analysis of German contributions in an international context. He makes no claim of exclusivity, however, and he clearly bases the development on French precedent, and to some extent on English, Dutch, and Italian as well. His understanding of technological science occasionally even includes the pragmatic and often whimsical aspect of technology, the creative aspect of "making," as evidenced particularly in British and North American developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bredt's development of cranes (pp. 293-308) is an intriguing German example, as is the Swiss Wilhelm Ritter's crane calculations (p. 452).

Kurrer has expanded the history of statics and prepared the way for others to go further. Aside from its theoretical and cultural value, his book [End Page 665] provides useful biographies of the innovators involved, and an extensive bibliography.

Tom F. Peters

Dr. Peters is director of the Building and Architectural Technology Institute and professor of...

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