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  • The Art of Building in Its Many Forms
  • Tom F. Peters (bio)
Karl-Eugen Kurrer, The History of the Theory of Structures: From Arch Analysis to Computational Mechanics

Five years ago, I reported in these pages on the first and very successful German edition of this book—a seminal work that explores new historiographical possibilities in the history of technology. Everything I wrote then holds true for this inspired, expanded edition, and then some. I would refer the reader to that review, especially for a description of the book’s multileveled structure and contents (Technology and Culture 45 [July 2004]: 664–66). Now, five years later, the two wishes I expressed, that the study might someday be translated into English and expanded to include more of the Anglo-Saxon development of engineering science and of variant ways of thinking, have come to pass, and we have Karl-Eugen Kurrer’s revised The History of the Theory of Structures (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 2008, pp. 848, €119).

The translation has been expertly rendered, the text completely reworked and expanded from 539 to 848 pages, and its complexity has been correspondingly augmented. As in the original German version, the book is multifaceted. It provides aperçus from areas that one would not normally associate with such a supposedly analytical topic, and it is copiously illustrated with diagrams, construction details, and structures, and photographs of working environments, publications, models, manuscripts, advertising ephemera, and portraits—667 illustrations in all. The scope of the visual material alone is evidence of the unusual, matrix-like nature of the study.

As I wrote in the previous review, a periodization permeates the book and serves to string the heterogeneous aspects into a network of order. At first blush this may appear arbitrary, but its logic serves to organize the wide-ranging material. Kurrer defines four periods: Preparation (1575–1825), Discipline Formation (1825–1900), Consolidation (1900–1950), and [End Page 669] Integration (1950 to the present). He then subdivides these into phases, the first into Orientation (1575–1700), Application (1700–1775), and the Initial (1775–1825). The second period is divided into Constitution (1825–1850), Establishment (1850–1875), and the Classical (1875–1900). The third consists of Accumulation (1900–1925) and Invention (1925–1950), and finally, the period in which we find ourselves today is split into Innovation (1950–1975) and Diffusion (1975 to the present).

The first section on the tasks and aims of the historical study has been supplemented in this version with an invitation that sketches the novel breadth of the book: it invites the reader to join the author in one or more of seven ways to discover the history of structural theory that he explains through images drawn from Franz Kafka and Friedrich Hölderlin. Kurrer encourages readers to develop their own subjective approach to this work; those who prefer the mathematics of analysis will find it and trace the development that way. Those who prefer the personal or anecdotal, the structural or constructional, will understand the development too.

It is even more difficult to do justice to the complexity of this edition than it was to the first. Kurrer himself refers to it as a “historico-logical jigsaw” (p. 605), but it is decidedly a poly-dimensional jigsaw puzzle! There comes a time in the development of any field when a need arises for comprehensive overviews of topics that scholars had treated in detailed studies in the pioneering years. Some thirty years or so into the development, the history of construction is now at such a juncture, and this book is one such overview. But it is far more that that: it breaks new ground in dealing with a whole field of human knowledge, not only “internally” (as did many of the earlier books on the history of the analytical side of building like those by Henry Cowan, Stephen Timoshenko, István Szabó, T. M. Charlton, and Edoardo Benvenuto) by treating it from the perspective of the subject matter itself, but also from the perspectives of the persons involved in the development, and their characters, interactions, and quirks as viewed through the lens of the sociopolitical situations in which they labored.

Examples among many...

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