Me, Myself and Infrastructure: Private Lives and Public Works in America: The National Building Museum, Washington, D.C.

To commemorate its sesquicentennial in 2002, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) sponsored an array of special projects and events, many of them intended to heighten public understanding of civil engineering. Chief among those efforts was the ASCE's 150th anniversary exhibition, Me, Myself and Infrastructure: Private Lives and Public Works in America. This traveling exhibition was on view at the New-York Historical Society (May-September 2002), the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. (October 2002-February 2003), and in the concourse at One Market, a commercial building near San Francisco's restored ferry terminal (February to April 2003). Following a year in storage, it is scheduled to reopen at the Turtle Bay Exploration Park in Redding, California, where it will run from April 2004 through January 2005.

Although ASCE's leadership had agreed to underwrite a historical engineering exhibition of some type, Me, Myself and Infrastructure was the brainchild of Gregory K. Dreicer, a historian of technology who had earlier produced two highly acclaimed exhibitions at the National Building Museum, Barn Again! (1993) and Between Fences (1996). ¹ The Steering Committee of the ASCE 150th Anniversary and the independent ASCE Foundation provided technical and financial support for Me, Myself and Infrastructure, but gave Dreicer the curatorial independence needed to develop a novel and daring exploration of civil engineering in the United States. The result of this companionable collaboration was an original and successful exhibition.

During ASCE's first fifty years, civil engineers rose to the level of cultural heroes, as society lauded these skilled professionals for their contributions to designing, building, and maintaining the nation's impressive new water supply, transportation, communication, and energy networks. By the mid-twentieth century, however, Americans largely took those extensive public works systems for granted, and that shifting perspective contributed to a gentle but steady decline in the social status of civil engineers. In Me, Myself and Infrastructure, Dreicer uses humor, wit, irony, and unexpected twists on familiar topics to remind visitors of just how intimately their twenty-first-century lives are connected to the engineering networks around them.

Dreicer organizes the exhibition around six key questions, beginning with the simple query, "who's responsible?" This opening section explores the post-World War II boom in automobile-oriented suburban development, focusing on Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the wealthiest and fastest-growing counties in the United States. It points to the complex mix of people who shaped and made possible the new suburban landscapes. Engineers were intimately involved, of course, but so, too, were entrepreneurs, federal housing administrators, real estate developers, elected officials, and ordinary citizens. The exhibition underscores the fact that suburban development was not inevitable; it was the result of a culmination of choices. Societal preferences and technological infrastructure—notably in the form of highway transportation systems—significantly influenced land-use patterns, for example.

Visitors walk past a long row of mailboxes (fig. 1), each of which sports the name of an individual associated with an important development. Among the people featured are George Washington (who selected the site for the capital city), Henry Ford (for his role in mass-producing automobiles), Frank Turner (for his promotion of the interstate highway system), John T. "Til" Hazel (for his role as a real estate developer of Tysons Corner), Ray Kroc (for his development of the McDonald's franchise), and Sam Walton (for founding the suburban-oriented chain-store, Wal-Mart). Text labels and photographs flank each mailbox and provide the interpretative framework. Although clever and provocative, especially for visitors willing to pore over the text-heavy material, this section tends to err on the side of featuring too many people with too many stories. It is the one area of the exhibition where less would have been more.

The second section examines the question "is it safe...