Architect and Engineer: A Study in Sibling Rivalry (review)

This long, rich, profusely illustrated book is both rewarding and maddening. Beautifully produced in an oversized format, it explores the interactions of architects and engineers over four centuries—chiefly in Britain, France, and the United States. Befitting that breadth of aspiration, Andrew Saint has read deeply in dozens of specialist literatures. He deploys that knowledge with verve and assurance. His topic has an inherent fascination as well. Surely these “siblings” have, in their collaborations and rivalries, driven each other’s evolution in varying degrees. But in reaching for breadth, Saint delivers up endless narratives. His chapters lack effective framing, and ultimately the book seems a Herculean feat that accomplishes little.

Chapter 1 starts the story with “Imperial Works and Worthy Kings.” Its chief concern is the role of architecture in aggrandizing state power, a theme well suited to pre-revolutionary France, but far less applicable to the Greenwich Royal Observatory and L’Enfant’s Washington. Indeed, the chapter’s narrative really contrasts the extensive role of French architects in projecting royal power versus the works of British engineers in crafting the infrastructures of industrial society. Chapters 2 and 3 turn to novel materials of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, iron and concrete, exploring how their new structural potential created new design paradigms, exploited for the most part by new professionals. The iron chapter traces how the metal quietly insinuated itself into buildings, until the 1851 thunderclap of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. Concrete tended to come out of patented systems of design and construction (as much for the materials as the forms), eliciting new alliances between engineers, construction firms, and architects.

To this point the story privileges architecture, but Saint redresses that balance in chapter 4, “The Bridge.” He ignores the utilitarian truss bridge, so dominant in the railway age. Instead he evaluates masonry and suspension spans, as those types had architectural aspirations, even if they were mostly engineered structures. The major impression that Saint conveys in the middle chapters is that new materials and structures splintered architects from engineers—to the detriment of each.

Chapter 5 claims that a reconciliation brought these professionals back into a working relationship in the twentieth century. Again the structures lead the story; Saint suggests that the Sydney Opera House or the Pompidou Center required effective and equal collaborations between architects and engineers. Chapter 6 explores the education of engineers and architects in all three nations.

Saint closes with a short conclusion that attempts some analytic clarity. He poses three questions: “Were architects and engineers once more or less indistinguishable, as has often been alleged? If so, how and why did they separate? And how far-reaching has been the reconciliation of the twentieth century diagnosed in Chapter 5?” It would seem rather late in the book to pose these straightforward questions. But no matter, as it turns out that “the answers proffered tend to undermine the questions” (p. 485). By this point, a churlish reader might well be tempted to skip the last nine pages of the book.

Although his story privileges architecture, Saint is sympathetic to the importance of engineering. Indeed, the book’s apparent purpose is to argue that fine structures require both disciplines in harmonious partnership. The wide-ranging text also offers fascinating insights: Given the Dutch threat, Restoration England needed a powerful corps of architect/engineers, but Charles II lacked the power or finances to create that tool of state (p. 34). Iron came into eighteenth-century British building via contractors, rather than through architects or engineers (p. 67). The design precedent to the iron train shed was the glass-and-iron conservatory. Once railways electrified, however, that liberating innovation meant that “the railway station is handed back to the architect on a plate” (pp. 101, 126).

But Saint also offers up many maddening (and ahistoric) verdicts: architects and engineers “correspond to different facets of the human personality” (p. 11). Bridges are to be evaluated only by “direct experience” (p...