Artistry and Ingenuity in Artificial Stone: Indiana's Concrete Bridges, 1900-1942

In just over a century, reinforced concrete has developed from a material for very large flowerpots to an indispensable element in the construction of the modern infrastructure, particularly bridges. In the first half of this century its use was initially resisted, and even once accepted its exact role in bridge construction took a number of paths. James Cooper explores how those various paths played themselves out in the development of Indiana’s transportation network in a book that nominally serves as a catalog of surviving concrete bridge spans in the state. The narrative, however, fills the larger part of the book, making it more history than catalog. Artistry and Ingenuity in Artificial Stone is the sequel to Cooper’s 1987 survey of Indiana iron bridges, Iron Monuments to Distant Posterity, but unlike that book does not simply chronicle bridge types, focusing instead on the people and policies that shaped the adoption of concrete bridges before World War II. In particular, he examines how the rise of the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) and the Indiana State Highway Commission (ISHC), and their devotion to scientifically designed structures, shifted the balance of bridge design from private to state or federal engineers.

In particular, Cooper hinges his narrative on the rise and fall of Daniel B. Luten, a nationally known bridge engineer from Indiana, whose name could reasonably have been part of the book’s title. Luten’s patented method extended structural reinforcement into the piers and abutments, making the entire bridge one unit, rather than separate elements hinged at the springing points. Widely adopted before the Depression, Luten’s method was eventually eclipsed with his patents’ nullification, and Cooper admirably demonstrates the local effects of the ISHC’s adoption of federal BPR designs, which demanded analysis over empiricism (Luten’s designs were statically indeterminate). At the same time, bridge design passed through a number of phases, beginning with the City Beautiful movement in the 1890s and culminating with modernist structuralism in the 1940s and 1950s, and Cooper’s story touches on the debates over ornamentation vs. functionalism to which his title alludes. By integrating ideas of class, transportation policy, and urban planning into the narrative, the book provides more than many books on bridges, which choose to concentrate solely on structures and contracts.

Cooper largely omits secondary sources, acknowledging only the accepted authorities such as Billington, Condit, and especially Bruce Seely (on the BPR). He primarily relies on articles from trade journals—overwhelmingly from the Engineering News-Record—to construct his history of Indiana’s bridges. He has, in effect, written a book from the point of view of the engineers working at the time rather than relying on later synthetic literature, and in doing so has provided a useful narrative of highway engineering up to World War II. But he rarely takes that extra step to provide the reader with a sense of closure on whether the Indiana conditions were typical or atypical for regions outside the Midwest. Additionally, those well versed in bridge and highway history will find his lack of reference to a wider range of secondary sources slightly troubling.

Stylistically, the book suffers from slightly frenetic borders and page layout, and the early chapters could have used tighter editing and proofreading, but the short chapters, numerous subsections, and copious photos nevertheless make for easy reading. Cooper’s realization of the diversity of his potential readership produced a more troublesome flaw, however. In order to aid nonengineers, he has placed a number of boxes throughout the text with technical explanations of such matters as arches, loads, elastic theory, and reinforcement methods. Unfortunately, these aids interrupt the flow more than they assist in understanding. Some of the boxed inserts do provide engaging “human interest” stories, such as memories of the gypsy lifestyle of bridge-building families and curious bottomland trestles with one track for...