Staging the Tragedy of Time: Paul Cret and the Delaware ... · Staging the Tragedy of Time: Paul Cret and the Delaware River Bridge ... The cultivation of the mind through the knowledge

Staging the Tragedy of Time: Paul Cret and the Delaware River BridgeAuthor(s): Jonathan E. FarnhamSource: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Sep., 1998), pp. 258-279Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural HistoriansStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/991346 .

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Staging the Tragedy of Time Paul Cret and the Delaware River Bridge

JONATHAN E. FARNHAM, Princeton University

On 6 January 1925 in the Rose Garden of the Bellevue-

Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, at the Delaware River

Bridge (DRB) Third Annual Staff Dinner, Paul Cret, the

Beaux-Arts-educated French architect and professor of design at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, sat

at Table 16 with his collaborators, engineers Montgomery Case, Clement Chase, Allston Dana, and Leon Moisseiff (Fig- ure 1).1 During the evening the celebrants sang several songs from the "Third Annual Staff Dinner Song Book," including two specifically about the bridge. As might be expected of any

eulogy of a bridge, the lyrics to "Song 23" evoked notions of

unity and connection:

There's a long, long Bridge a-stretching across the River Delaware

And unites the State ofJersey with our Pennsylvania fair.

As a monument of glory, of great endeavor and of fame

It will always be connected with the BRIDGE COMMISSION's name.

As the voices of architect and engineers rose in concert from

Table 16, did Cret hear the harmonious bridging of antinomies that he strove to concretize in his numerous collaborative

bridge designs? Paul Cret's designs for the DRB, the first of his many bridge

projects, as well as his theoretical writing on bridges and

bridging, provide a unique vantage point from which to survey the threshold between architecture and engineering.2 At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth

centuries, the relationship between architecture and engineering was inextricably tied to changing conceptions of history, temporality, and modernity.3 While engineers and their tech-

nological productions participated in defining the predomi- nant conception of temporality through the powerful notion of progress, architects, who lacked a clear link with progress, were unsure of their relationship to time. Furthermore, these uncertainties about the connections to both engineering and

emerging conceptions of modernity intertwined with more

general apprehensions about shifting notions of threshold and boundary. With the rapid professionalization of both

architectural and engineering practices and specialization

within these practices, which began in the United States in the late nineteenth century, architects encountered new boundaries as well as new notions of boundedness.4 By the beginning of the modern period, the central problem of American architecture was conceived in terms of links and limits; it was a

problem of bridging. The prominent role of bridges in both the theory and

historiography of the European architectural avant-garde dur-

ing this period is well known. For example, Le Corbusier's

essay "Esth6tique de l'ing6nieur architecture" of 1921, re-

printed as the first chapter of Vers une architecture (1923), opens with an image of Alexandre Gustave Eiffel's Pont de Garabit (1884) (Figure 2). The bridge is presented as the apex of

nineteenth-century French engineering and the herald of a new tradition. For Le Corbusier, the modern iron or steel

bridge was the foremost emblem of technology. "The direct and immediate expression of progress," the bridge "mark[ed] out the stages of civilization" and pointed the way toward a new architecture.5 Like Le Corbusier's manifesto, Sigfried Giedion's operative history, Space, Time and Architecture (1941), particularly his chapter on "The Schism between Architecture and Technology," turns on the bridge.6 Giedion's story of the

genesis of modern architecture is a tale of bridges and bridging that extended from Abraham Darby's iron bridge at Coal- brookdale of 1779, the site of the separation of architecture and engineering, to Robert Maillart's reinforced concrete

bridge at Tavanasa of 1905, the point of their reconciliation.

Claiming that construction, "the subconsciousness of architecture," assumed precedence during the nineteenth century, Giedion argued that a truly modern architecture emerged only when architecture reconnected, through engineering, to the present.7 The embodiment of connection, the bridge was

championed as both the site and the metaphor for this reunifi- cation.8

Like the European modernists, American engineers and their apologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries asserted that bridges, unlike architecture, mirrored and also marked the progress of human civilization. They articulated a relationship between building and time that situated the bridge at the nexus of a series of discourses on the

258 JSAH / 57:3, SEPTEMBER 1998



FIGURE 1: Ralph Modjeski, chief engineer, Delaware River Bridge between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Camden, New Jersey, 1920-1927. Rendering by Paul Cret, 1921

Viaduc de Garabit (M. EzrEns)

REVUE DE L'ANOtE

ESTHtTIOUE DE L'INGtNIEUR ARCHITECTURE

Par LE CORBUSIER-SAUGNIER

FIGURE 2: Le Corbusier, introductory page to the essay entitled "Esthetique de

l'ingenieur-architecture," L'Esprit nouveau (November 1921). Included is a photo-

graph of Alexandre Gustave Eiffel's Pont de Garabit across the

Truy.re

in France,

1884.

physics and metaphysics of construction. Speaking for engineers, the mathematician, literary critic, and historian of

science and technology Archibald Henderson declared:

Nowhere in the material world do we find so significant, so continu-

ously enthralling an image as that of a bridge. From the dawn of

creation the bridge was-coeval with man, contemporaneous with the

individual, as with the life of the race, reflecting in all its minute and

countless changes the minute and countless changes of human civiliza-

tion. ... The whole meaning of progress is summed up in the bridge-at

once a daring symbol and a splendid reality.9

So confident were American engineers that one proclaimed: "The formal title of the man who exerts a greater influence in

the civilized world at the present time than any other human

being.., .is The Supreme Bridge-Builder,-Pontifex Maxi-

mus.10

Questioning these prevailing conceptions of the interrela-

tionship of bridges, architecture, engineering, and time, Paul

Cret challenged two fundamental claims: that the schism

between architecture and engineering betrayed a breach be-

tween architecture and the present, and that the bridge of-

fered the possibility of a pure, undifferentiated union. Refut-

ing the commonly held view that architecture would become

truly modern when it shed the burden of history, when it

escaped the past and embraced the present, Cret contested

the assumption that bridging inherently produces identity. In Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier declaimed: "Let

us listen to the counsel of American engineers."" In 1928, in

an essay of the same title, architect Claude Bragdon, a consul-

tant on numerous bridge designs, likewise declared: "The

engineer, forced to abandon all aid and comfort from the Old

World and the past by reason of the newness of his material

(steel) and the novelty of his problems, and therefore subject to no educational malpractice, has succeeded where the archi-

tect, taught only to lie and to steal, has failed."'12 By contrast, Paul Cret urged architects "toward a new classicism" that, in

fostering a link between but also preserving the integrity of

novelty and tradition, extolled the productive nature of bridg-

ing.13

Portraying architects as unaware of advances in technological culture and therefore disengaged from the present had

become commonplace in engineering discourse by 1925 when

Cret began to call for a "new classicism." As early as 1869,

bridge engineer Alfred Pancoast Boller had observed: "It

would be an interesting, and perhaps a profitable speculation, to inquire in what manner the separation of the professions

may have produced what is popularly called the 'degeneracy of

modern architecture.' "14 Seemingly unable to develop a single

style for the modern age, architects wasted time proliferating

"degenerate" revival styles. Architecture, according to this

view, had slipped out of joint with time. By the second half of

the nineteenth century, it had become anachronistic.

"Is not our new leader an engineer, rather than a philolo-

gist or an antiquary?" asked Calvin Woodward, dean of the

School of Engineering at George Washington University, in

1895.15 He continued, "The engineer is by nature an icono-

clast. He has small respect for the traditions. He snaps his

fingers in scorn at all whose chief pride and glory lies in their

submission to the 'tyranny of the ancients.' He cares less for

what he has been than what he may be. His triumphs, his

FARNHAM: PAUL CRET 259



masterpieces, his heroes, his golden age, are all in the future.

He walks forward, with his face to the front; not backward, with

his face to the past. .... The engineer makes precedents; other

men follow them."'6 Buoyed by the cogent notion of progress, the engineer escaped the burden of history.17 Convinced of his authentic relationship to time, one engineer proclaimed:

"Bridges typify progress more than any other structures built

by man ... [and] the growth of bridge building seems almost

biological .... The bridge engineer acts as agent in this evolu-

tion."1s By the beginning of World War I, the conception of the forward-looking, future-oriented engineer and the back-

ward-looking, tradition-bound architect was firmly established. The relatively new academic discipline of architectural

history was often faulted for the architect's apparent turn from

the future and relevance. Critics noted that the naive student of architecture, while studying architectural history, was apt to lose sight of history itself and deduce transhistorical architec-

tural principles from the architectures of distant times and

places. In 1892 architect and critic Leopold Eidlitz observed:

"The artistic branch [of architectural education] teaches

mainly architectural history. The student is overwhelmed with

a mass of architectural monuments ... [and] believes all monu-

ments of the past to be perfect works of art. They are all

equally indisputable precedents for future efforts."'19 The sci-

ence of history, which was intimately linked with progressive

conceptions of time, was perplexing. While defining and

ordering the past, it simultaneously rendered all past moments

available to architects in the present. These new pasts, brought into the present, overwhelmed the architect. History itself

seemed to blind the architect to historicity. As Henry Van

Brunt, an early translator of Viollet-le-Duc and the first American architect to write on bridge aesthetics, remarked in

1897:

The cultivation of the mind through the knowledge of past achieve-

ments has in fact rendered the architect of to-day so self-conscious, and

has supplied him with such a multiplicity of conflicting ideals, that his

inherent creative power is weakened and his natural initial force is lost

in a sort of intellectual timidity and vacillation. With the distractions

furnished by his familiarity with history he cannot adjust himself to his

own environment with the frankness and naiveti by which the masters

of the classic and medieval times developed architectural style. In this

respect the modern engineer enjoys a distinct advantage over his

brother, the modern architect. Fortunately in the practice of his profes-

sion he is not embarrassed by these grave distinctions, and his art has

consequently progressed with the general progress of the century.20

For American architects in the early twentieth century, history proved to be an almost inescapable burden, and their stories of building bridges were always, in one way or another, about

carrying this load.

BATTLING FOR THE BRIDGEHEAD: ARCHITECTS,

ENGINEERS, AND PROFESSIONAL BOUNDARIES

Proposals to span the Delaware River between Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania, and Camden, New Jersey, date back to 1818.21

Investigations for the project that eventually succeeded in

bridging the river began in 1914 but slowed during World War

I.22 After the war, in the spring of 1919, as the project regained momentum, architect Warren Powers Laird, a professor of

design at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylva- nia and a consultant to the interstate panel charged with

building the DRB, issued a report titled "The Placement of the

Proposed Bridge over the Delaware River. "23 Although primar- ily concerned with determining the best location for the

Philadelphia bridge terminal, Laird instigated a fractious debate between architects and engineers when he asserted that an architect, not an engineer, should be charged with

planning and constructing the bridge. Predicting that the

bridge would be ranked "among [the] great achievements of architectural art," Laird declared that the structure "invites its builders to conceive it as a great work of architecture. ... This can be accomplished only if the monument is created by a master mind in architecture working in coordination with the

best engineering skill."24 The bold statement sent shock waves through the local engineering community. In response, the Philadelphia members of the American Society of Civil

Engineers (ASCE) countered that "the design and erection of such structures [as the DRB must] be under the responsible

charge of competent and experienced civil engineers." Issu-

ing a resolution in protest, they urged the governor of Pennsyl- vania to appoint "men qualified as civil engineers and not as architects" to design and construct the great suspension bridge.25

As the dispute over professional territory raged in Philadel-

phia, it coincided with a similar conflict in Pittsburgh regarding the issue of whether architects or engineers were better suited to design and construct large-scale publicly funded

bridges. In July 1918 architect Ralph Cram lectured to Pitts-

burgh's art commission on the need to consider beauty as well as strength and economy when designing bridges.26 Following the lecture,John W. Beatty, director of the art commission and

professor of fine arts at the Carnegie Institute, began lobbying for architectural control of bridge design in Pittsburgh. In the summer of 1919 the county planning commissioners of Pitts-

burgh, acting upon Beatty's recommendations, awarded con-

tracts for three large bridges to architects rather than engi-

neers.27 The unprecedented commissions were immediately condemned by the engineering profession. An editorial in the

Engineering News-Record, the most prominent American civil

engineering journal, speculated: "Is the architect competent to design a large steel bridge or to direct its construction? If he

is, surely the present-day science and art of engineering is a




delusion and a mockery."28 Defending architects' forays into

bridge design, the heart of civil engineering, the American

Institute of Architects (AIA) declared in the pages of the

American Architect: "The architect to-day is becoming more

than ever before the master builder and he is to-day slowly but

surely assuming his proper function as the dominator of every feature of construction, as he has in so many cases proven his

ability to function as the head of building operations.'"29 In January 1920, just weeks after the AIA portrayed the

architect as "master builder," the Pennsylvania State Art Com-

mission joined the fray with an open letter to Governor

William C. Sproul.30 After denigrating a series of bridges for

their "pure cheapness," which had recently been constructed

by engineers in Philadelphia, the art commission further

infuriated engineers with the false claim that the "great bridges of New York have all been planned by architects." Insisting that the "actual structural problem" of the DRB would be

"after all but a detail" when compared with the complex architectural dimensions of the project, the commission pressed for architectural control of the bridge.3' Again, local engineers

immediately objected. As a local front-page headline reported,

"Engineers Laugh at Architects' 'Ego' on Bridge Matter,"

engineers dispatched their own resolutions to the governors of Pennsylvania and New Jersey and the mayors of Philadel-

phia and Camden.32 Portraying architects as artists, not con-

structors, the municipal engineers declared "that without an

engineer [to lead the DRB project] the greatest of architects

would be paralyzed after he had made his first charcoal

sketch."33

Throughout the spring and summer of 1920, charges and

countercharges circulated in numerous editorials and articles

in the popular and professional presses.34 Several local, re-

gional, and national engineering organizations issued resolu-

tions denouncing architectural control of bridge projects.35 In March 1920 engineers involved in what was by then known as

the "Pittsburgh Bridge Case" requested that representatives of

the Engineering Council, a national consortium of engineer-

ing societies, meet with their counterparts from the AIA to

mediate the escalating conflict.36 Two months later a joint committee composed of three architects and three engineers issued a report that insisted on the necessity of collaboration

and concluded that "whether the engineer is chief and the architect associate or vice versa is an administrative detail of

relative unimportance. Either combination should secure sat-

isfactory results."7 Fueling instead of dousing the firestorm

raging between the professions, the joint committee's evasive

conclusion reinvigorated the war between them. In a "man-

fully expressed resolution" replete with "manfully direct word-

ing," the Board of Direction of the ASCE declared that the

Engineering Council, which represented the profession on

thejoint committee, had no authority to speak for the engineer-

ing community.38 With no end in sight, the controversy rumbled through the summer and into the fall of 1920.

In early September 1920 the Bensalem Avenue Bridge in

northeastern Philadelphia, a 585-foot-long, highly decorated, three-arch concrete structure designed by engineers of the

city's Department of Public Works, was opened to traffic.39 The

Philadelphia Art Jury, the branch of municipal government that passed judgment on aesthetic issues in construction

projects involving public funds or land, praised it as "one of

the most beautiful [bridges] in America," but engineers dis-

agreed.40 On 16 September 1920, just two weeks after it

opened, the bridge was featured on the cover of the Engineer-

ingNews-Record. Inside, the article "Bensalem Ave. Bridge--An

Essay in Ornamentation" and the editorial "What Is Art?"

attacked the subjective nature of bridge decoration and, ignor-

ing the fact that the bridge had been designed by engineers, accused architects of arbitrariness: " [S] trength is measurable

and definite; beauty is neither, but too often only lies in the eye of the beholder." ".[T]he engineer's instinct for simplicity in

bridge design," the editors of Engineering News-Record sug-

gested, was indisputably sound.41

The Engineering News-Record cover story and editorial un-

leashed a flood of anti-architectural rhetoric. In a letter to the

editor titled "What Is Art?," Philadelphia engineer John C.

Trautwine Jr. declared that the bridge "testifies to the unwis-

dom of letting the architect perpetrate ... architectural disfig- urements" and demanded structures "unperverted by 'archi-

tecture.' "42 In the next issue, again under the heading "What

Is Art?," Rudolph Hering, who had served as Philadelphia's assistant engineer in charge of bridges and sewers, "sub-

scribed" to Trautwine's harsh judgment of architecture, claim-

ing that "the greatest beauty of form in a structure" was always achieved "in the simplest and most direct way."43 The AIA

answered the engineers in its own column in the American

Architect, also titled "What Is Art?" Labeling Trautwine's letter

"unjust, misleading and in a certain sense pernicious," the

editor of American Architect appealed to both sides to establish

"harmonious relations" between the professions and to put aside "petty jealousies" and "querulous squabbling."44 But

the contentious exchange of letters in the Engineering News- Record and the American Architect continued into the winter of

1920.45

George Sydney Binckley's article "Art in Structures," which

appeared in the Engineering News-Record in November 1920, was offered by engineers more or less as an olive branch.

Stressing the need for harmony, Binckley maintained that the function of architectural ornament was to soothe, not inflame,

the joints of construction. Noting that the ornamentation of

the Brooklyn Bridge was "a most perfect blending of engineer-

ing and art," Binckley advocated a collaborative design method that would reconcile structure with ornament and engineer-




ing with architecture.46 Although the notion of collaboration

appealed to both professions, it left unresolved the conten-

tious issue of hierarchy. For example, Binckley's cooperative association offered reconciliation, but it gave priority to engi-

neering over architecture. This question of hierarchy would

ultimately be resolved in the broader realm of public politics. Warren Powers Laird, the Philadelphia architect who had

instigated the Pennsylvania bridge controversies in 1919, con-

tinued to advocate the hiring of an architect to design the

DRB.47 In an open letter in the Philadelphia Evening Public

Ledger on 15 September 1920, he reiterated that the "building of the bridge is pre-eminently an architectural problem."48 Five days later, the Delaware River Bridge Joint Commission, an interstate panel of politicians charged with overseeing the

construction of the bridge, settled the question of professional

hierarchy by engaging a board of three engineers, Ralph

Modjeski and his assistants George S. Webster and Lawrence A. Ball, to lead the project.49

Shortly thereafter Paul Cret and his small architectural firm

were chosen to collaborate with Modjeski's team to ensure that

the DRB would meet the escalating artistic expectations of

Laird, Cram, and others. A French national who immigrated to the United States in 1903, Cret had been catapulted to

national prominence with his competition-winning design of

1907 for the Pan American Union Building in Washington, D.C.50 In addition to his private architectural practice, he also

held key posts on Philadelphia's municipal planning agencies and projects. He was a member of Philadelphia's ArtJury and

its Permanent Committee on Comprehensive Plans-the board

that coordinated the design of the city's urban fabric-and a

collaborator on both the Schuylkill River Embankment Plan

(1905) and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway (1904-1919).51 By the outbreak of the war he was renowned, at least in Philadel-

phia, as an architect of civic buildings and a city planner. In 1914 he returned to France to fight in the trenches. During his wartime absence he was celebrated in the Philadelphia press as both a war hero and a master of civic design.52 In 1919, after the war, he resumed his professional and academic positions in Philadelphia. At the time of his appointment to the DRB

design team, Cret was working on preliminary designs for a new building for the Detroit Institute ofArts.53

Soon after he was appointed to the DRB design team, in November 1920, Cret wrote to chief engineer Modjeski that his "architectural studies and drawings of the Delaware

Bridge... will include the city planning features of the approaches, the approaches [themselves] and the architectural

design of the bridge."54 Seven months later, in June 1921, a

preliminary version of the team's technologically innovative

design for the DRB was made public by the Board of Engi- neers.55 Construction began on 6 January 1922, inaugurated with parades through Philadelphia and Camden and a ground-

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FIGURE 3: Caricature of Ralph Modjeski by an unknown artist, from the invitation to

the Delaware River Bridge Fourth Annual Staff Dinner, held 6 January 1926

breaking ceremony on a pier that would be demolished to make way for the mammoth structure.56 When completed, in time for the sesquicentennial of the United States on 4 July 1926, the DRB was, for a short time, the longest suspension bridge in the world.57 Cret's office continued to work on the

bridge until the completion in August 1927 of the Delaware River Port Authority office building at the Camden approach to the bridge.58

With the conflicts between American architects and engineers centered on Pennsylvania's bridges, the collaboration of

Modjeski (Figure 3) and Cret (Figure 4) on the design and construction of the world's longest bridge promised to recon-

figure the boundary between the professions. Coincidentally both men had trained in France at the two institutions that were often cited as representing the philosophical differences between their professions; Modjeski trained at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees in Paris until 1885 and Cret trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, first in Lyons until 1897 and then in Paris until 1903.59 By the time Cret completed his education, the stereotypical identifications of the two schools with the rationalism of the engineer and the aestheticism of the architect, while not accurate, were well established.60

It is not surprising, given the circumstances, that Cret

began to contemplate the professional divide soon after his




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FIGURE 4: Caricature of Paul P. Cret, from the invitation to the Delaware River Bridge

Fourth Annual Staff Dinner, held 6 January 1926

appointment to the DRB design team. On 16 May 1921, dur-

ing the most intense phase of the preliminary design effort, he

delivered a lecture titled "Modern Architecture," in which he

spoke, apparently for the first time, of "the divorce between

engineering and architecture."61 In an essay published two

years later, he elaborated on his perception of a schism:

Where formerly one directing mind, at once artist and scientific con-

structor, sufficed (the famous architect of the seventeenth century

would build indifferently a Versailles or one of those splendid bridges

we still admire), the nineteenth century has differentiated the two

functions. ... There is then a separation between these two branches of

the building profession, which often collaborate, but often, too, ignore

each other. When there is this divorce between the two-it is the work

that suffers.62

In a subsequent essay on collaboration and bridges, Cret

expressed his certainty of the significance of the Ecole des Ponts et Chauss~es in the history of the relations between the

professions, declaring that its founding in 1747 had "signal- ized the definite division of the hitherto united professions of

engineering and architecture into two distinct professions."63 Despite talk of divorce, in numerous public and private

statements, Cret and others identified the DRB as the site for a new cooperation between the separate branches of the build-

ing profession. Indeed in published accounts of its design and

construction, the bridge was represented as the embodiment

of a harmonic confluence of the fields. In 1927, for example, H. D. Eberlein declared the project "a case of sympathetic,

intelligent and tactful collaboration between Ralph Modjeski, the chief engineer, and Paul P. Cret, the architect."" Corre-

spondence between Cret and Modjeski supports this claim. In a letter writtenjust as the design team was disbanded in August 1927, Modjeski declared: "I want to express to you what great

pleasure it has been to have you as collaboratorin the great work

of the bridge. I feel it is largely due to your art that we have succeeded in building a bridge of which we are all proud."65 Cret replied: "It was a great pleasure for me to collaborate with

your Board in the study of the Bridge, and I value very highly

your commendation of my efforts."66 But what precisely did collaboration connote to Cret?

In an essay, "The Architect as Collaborator with the Engi- neer," published in 1928 in ArchitecturalForum, Cret expanded on the theme of bridging and collaboration that he had begun to investigate at the DRB. Although that design was not ad-

dressed in the text until the final paragraph, Cret included sixteen renderings and photographs of the bridge (Figure 5).67 Written in the emphatic and evocative language of a mani-

festo, the essay offered Cret's hope for the reconciliation of architecture not only with engineering but also with the domi-

nant, modern conception of time. He identified "evolution

(that is to say progress)," as defined by engineer-turned-

philosopher Herbert Spencer, as the force that had separated the once unified building professions.68 Adopting Spencer's thesis, Cret asserted that evolution is the constant, natural

progression from sameness toward difference. Citing the futil-

ity of resistance to what he called the "law of incessant change," the movement toward greater and greater heterogeneity, he

argued for an architecture in agreement with Spencer's advanc-

ing, differentiating present.69 Most importantly, Cret advo-

cated a collusion of remembering and forgetting as the avenue toward a new architecture that would be simultaneously modern and conscious of the role of history in any notion of

modernity.70

Remembering and forgetting mark four critical points in

Cret's essay. First, he observed that an "increased diversity of taste in planning and in the use of materials and the necessity of directing a large staff of minor artisans and tradesmen force

[the architect] to forget even such mathematics as he has

learned in order to devote himself exclusively to the problem of aesthetics."71 For Cret, the expanding fissure between archi-

tecture and engineering was inevitable; the passage of time, the evolutionary movement toward what Spencer called differ-

ence, demanded that the modern architect forget that the architect and engineer had been unified as the master builder and accept collaboration. Next, he argued that the architect "cannot allow himself to forget..,. that the 'spirit' of steel is not the 'spirit' of stone."72 Steel, a modern material, is imbued




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FIGURE 5: Two adjacent pages from Paul Cret's essay "The Architect as Collaborator with the Engineer," from Architectural Forum (July 1928). Note the juxtaposition of masonry and steel forms in the layout of the images of the Delaware River Bridge.

with the spirit of the present, but stone, he claimed, houses the

spirit of the past. The architect must not forget that stone and

steel as well as past and present are separate but linked.

Simultaneously embracing the spirit of steel and preserving the spirit of stone, the architect remembers that the modern

moment, the present, is singular but not autonomous. It is the

latest step in a historical process. Although Cret maintained

that the architect must remember fundamental differences, he also asserted: "The architect must have no fear of simplic-

ity; he must have the daring to sacrifice the facile common-

places of stereotyped trimming; he must be ready to forget even

the beautiful forms that stock his mental arsenal; he must have

the courage to eliminate-and eliminate."73 Architectural

forms of the past must not anchor the architect in the past. The past becomes the past as such only after the architect has

forgotten its unimportant differences and created a new present. Expanding upon this notion, Cret, evidently searching for

a new vocabulary, concluded that "it should be remembered that

to the creative mind, every change and displacement that time

and circumstance develop are elements that enrich rather

than limit the means of creation."74 The architect must remem-

ber and carry across time an awareness that it is precisely the

passage of time, discernible only when the limit between one

moment and the next is acknowledged, that creates the possi-

bility of the modern.

While maintaining that every new moment affords the

possibility of novelty, Cret asserted that the past must not be

forgotten as a distinct and constituent part of the present. The

collaboration of architect and engineer generates a bond that

holds past and present together as it marks the difference

between them. At the same time, Cret declared that architec-

ture must not fold into engineering; even in a modern tech-

nologized society "the architect is not relieved of his task.

Architecture remains an art."75 He insisted, "The architect

and the engineer must perform a sort of duo, each contribut-

ing his share of special knowledge in the creation of a struc-




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FIGURE 6: The Delaware River Bridge engineering team at the Manhattan Bridge, 18

November 1921. Carrere and Hastings's arch and colonnade rise in the background.

Left to right: consulting engineer Edward A. Byme, commissioner Samuel M. Vauclain,

and engineers George S. Webster, Ralph Modjeski, and Leon S. Moisseiff

ture which is to be both a mechanical unit and an aesthetic

unit."76 Cret's collaboration unified the two branches of build-

ing but simultaneously maintained their difference.

NOSTALGIA, AMNESIA, AND ARCHITECTURE

Cret's notion of productive collaboration is illuminated by the

critical debate regarding the relationship of the DRB to the

Manhattan Bridge in New York City, designed and built be-

tween 1900 and 1909 by a team that included the architect

Thomas Hastings of the Beaux-Arts firm of Carrere and Hast-

ings, Ralph Modjeski, the DRB's chief engineer, and Leon S.

Moisseiff, the DRB's design engineer. Considered the first

truly modern suspension bridge, the Manhattan Bridge stands

at the head of a technological trajectory that is linked with the

DRB and the great suspension bridges of the 1930s.77 While

the innovative technology of the Manhattan Bridge was widely

acknowledged, its architectural merit was fiercely contested.

Some contemporary critics declared that it was "beautiful as

well as useful," but the bridge's Beaux-Arts ornamentation

had many detractors, including the DRB designers (Figure 6).78

InJune 1921 they stated that "a comparison of existing bridges has shown that the most beautiful ones are not those where

architectural decoration has been lavished."79 Cret also was

critical of bridge decoration, including the triumphal arch

and colonnade added by Carreire and Hastings in the late

teens, asserting that "the piers of a steel bridge are-the piers of a steel bridge; to conceive them as a 'portal,' and so to

develop them architecturally as a Roman city gate, or trium-

phal arch, would be a fatal contradiction of their function."8o To be in accord with the time, Cret argued, the architect needed to

produce architecture for the present. To reproduce forms of the

past, to produce a steel bridge in the guise of a Roman triumphal arch, was tantamount to forgetting the present, to wasting time.

Thomas Hastings, like Cret and so many other architects

and engineers of the period, spoke of time in his essay "The

Relations of Life to Style in Architecture" (1894): "What an

inspiration there is in working for and with one's own time!

How much devotion there is when one's ideal is higher than

anything that has ever been done! No matter how short we

may come of it, we are reaching forward instead of backward.

We are carrying on and developing the natural course of

things in a true historic spirit."Just as Cret would prophesy the

evolution of a "new classicism" in 1925, Hastings anticipated a

timely paradox when he called for "the dawn of a modern

Renaissance, which, as has always been the case, will be guided

by the fundamental principles of the classic."81 But Hastings was what Cret termed an "archaeologist."82 For Cret, the new

classicism would not be characterized by a nostalgic recollection

of forms but instead would derive from a dynamic integration of remembering and forgetting, and past and present, achieved

by the harmonic collaboration of architect and engineer. In 1928, the year Cret's essay on collaboration appeared in

Architectural Forum, Claude Bragdon emphatically rejected the

"archaeological" architecture of designers like Hastings, charg-

ing that American architects refused to grapple with the novel

materials and programs that modernity had thrust upon them.

"With few exceptions," Bragdon declared, "the 'triumphs' of

American architecture are the triumphs of American engineer-

ing;.., .the architect so far from seeking a new dramatic

expression for new building materials and unprecedented structural methods, has been (with a few notable and honor-

able exceptions) a reactionary.., instead of pressing boldly forward in an effort to develop an architecture which is

indigenous and new, as is demanded by our unprecedented

problems and our modern outlook and point of view.""83

Advocating an architecture of amnesia, Bragdon dismissed

Hastings's "reactionary" nostalgia-a condition that Cret in-

sightfully described as "an impatient nostalgia for the familiar

past.'"" But Bragdon also rejected Cret's notion of collabora-

tive remembering and forgetting. Of the architect who turned

to the past, he declared: "Greece, Rome, Renaissance Italy, and medieval Europe will not help him. If he plays about in

those fair and ruined gardens, he is only wasting his time."85

Bragdon's characterization of the past as a garden is revealing. The garden was often evoked in modernist rhetoric as a

timeless realm of ornamental beauty closed off from all spaces of utility and necessity. In rejecting both the garden and the

past, Bragdon was by implication also rejecting the constitutive

role of the past in the construction of the present.86 For Cret,

by contrast, boundary markers such as garden fences mark

beginnings as well as endings. And like these fences, bridges, when conceived as links and limits, as landmarks, gather and

frame antinomies and thereby create.87

Although Cret's notion of collaborative bridging, of linking




and limiting, extended the possibility of reconnecting and

reconciling architecture with engineering, his 1928 bridge

essay opened enigmatically:

There lurks in humanity, whose curious role has always been that of the

destined antagonist of nature, a persistent dissatisfaction with nature's

inert obedience to its own laws; a dissatisfaction that is active and noble

in certain respects, and in others, foolish and blind,-the source of

human power and of human weakness in equal parts. What, for

instance, is the paradoxical attitude of mind which combines a clear

perception of the laws of progress with a stubborn tendency to look

backward, and to see in the past the ideal toward which society ought to

be-and is not-proceeding?ss

While recognizing the intractable law of progress, Cret praised the urge to trespass. The architect, he argued, should neither

acquiesce to the amnesia of pure utility nor surrender to the

nostalgia of pure recollection. Instead, the architect should

strive, even if in vain, to exceed the limitations of each be-

cause, in the futile labor to transgress, limits are perceived and

preserved. "Thomas Huxley once observed that Herbert Spen- cer's idea of a tragedy was a 'Theory killed by a Fact.' But

Spencer was not advancing a mere theory when he defined

evolution (that is to say progress).... He was describing a fact.""89

For Cret, consciousness of time's progressive movement simulta-

neously rendered existence human and tragic. A collaborative

bridging that was not simply a blurring, that focused and preserved limits, between, for example, fact and theory, or past and

present, actually constituted the essence of the human condi-

tion. But the cognizance of limits that gave this gift of humanity

concurrently poisoned it with the awareness of death as the

absolute, or end limit. Reflecting upon the same conundrum, Friedrich Nietzsche had observed years earlier that "the human

being says 'I remember,' and he envies the animal that immedi-

ately forgets. ... When death finally brings him the much longed for oblivion, it simultaneously suppresses the present; and with

this, existence places its seal on the knowledge that existence itself is nothing but an uninterrupted having-been, something that lives by negating, consuming, contradicting itself.""9 For

Cret, if the abysmal gaps of human existence could be bridged by architecture, the collaboration between architect and engineer was nothing less than the dramatic performance of the human tragedy. Therefore, his designs for the Delaware River

Bridge, which united but did not merge architecture and

engineering, must be read as a staging, a production, of the

tragedy of time-of the temporal and temporary.91

AN AGREEMENT OF THINGS THAT DISAGREE

A suspension bridge has four main components: anchorages, towers, cables, and deck. Of these four components, architects and engineers alike agreed by the 1920s that the design of the cable and deck structure was strictly an engineering problem.

In a revealing statement, Othmar Ammann, chief engineer of

the George Washington Bridge (1923-1931)--a structure con-

ceived in consultation with DRB design engineer Moisseiff-

claimed that "the design of the suspended structure, the floor, and the cables, resolved itself largely in the application of natural and most simple structural forms which neither re-

quired nor permitted architectural treatment to satisfy aesthet-

ics."92 Ammann's conviction that the design of the suspended structure was purely a matter of engineering derived from Moisseiff's innovations at the Manhattan Bridge, where he had

applied the deflection theory to license a drastic reduction in

the rigidity and bulkiness of suspension bridge decks by taking into account the allegedly inherent stiffness of the cables.93

Making possible the sleek, elegant, ribbon-like deck, the math-

ematical modeling theory was invoked in large part to justify an aesthetic preference. It rationalized the trajectory for the

art of suspension bridges that can be traced from the Manhat- tan Bridge through the DRB to the great American bridges of

the 1930s.94

With the deck and cable structure determined by the mathematics of the deflection theory and therefore beyond the bounds of art, modern suspension bridges offered two

points of intervention for the architect: the anchorages and

towers (Figure 7). But the architect's intervention at these

points was strictly circumscribed by structural requirements.95 Therefore, the primary architectural problem in suspension-

bridge design was not to shape individual forms but rather to

articulate the relationships between forms largely predeter- mined by the calculations of structural engineers. At the DRB, Cret's task was to negotiate and articulate a reconciliation between the oppositional systems of masonry anchorages and

steel towers, "to harmonize the stonework with the steel

construction.'"96 But he attempted not only to create an accord between stone and steel but also to effect a reconciliation between architecture and engineering, which "remain... in-

dividual, impenetrable to each other, yet indissolubly con-

nected, for good or ill.""' In bridging stone and steel, the

suspended structure of the DRB simultaneously holds not only

anchorage and tower but also architecture and engineering, together as well as apart. But Cret's metaphor-a connection of the disconnected-extends further.

According to Modjeski, "anchorages are probably more

difficult to design than any other part of the structure .... They must remain immovable under the uplifting and horizontal

sliding efforts to which they are subjected."" Each 200,000- ton anchorage receives the two cables from the adjacent tower and redirects them downward over an H-shaped silicon steel cable bent to a field of eyebars. The eyebars are secured to the reinforced concrete mass and, through caissons, to the bed- rock of ground (Figures 8, 9)." Clement E. Chase, the principal assistant engineer for the DRB, described the anchorages




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FIGURE 7: Anonymous sketch of the Delaware

River Bridge, c. 1927. Note the juxtaposition of

masonry and steel forms.

FIGURE 8: Section through the Camden anchor-

age, Delaware River Bridge, 1927

as "patient giants, passive participants in an endless tug-of- war."100 Another observer noted that suspension bridges "may

tug and pull with a giant's tuggings and pullings, and the

anchorages will remain fixed, solid as time itself."101 The

principal function of anchorages is to resist movement. In

staging his drama, Cret, who understood that the architect's

task was "not to decorate, but to interpret--to clothe," sought to denote this function.102 He dressed each anchorage in a

rough granite costume, translating it from a concrete and steel

machine to a granite house. Transforming the technological device into an architectural form that elicited as well as de-

pended upon memories, he shaped an anchorage that resisted

not only the pull of the cables but also the passage of time.

Cret's anchorage presents several memorable faces (Figure 10). At ground level, between the anchorage and the river-

bank, in the shadow of the bridge deck overhead, the cyclo-

pean granite giant appears as a colossal storehouse or tomb

from a timeless past. Between the extended buttresses, below

an enormous arch, a wall of smooth ashlar pierced with three

openings suggests an ancient doorway and alludes to the

cavernous vault within the anchorage. From the narrow, crowded streets around the anchorage, a second face of mas-

sive, rusticated stone walls, with towers rising 180 feet above

the pavement, exudes a brutal materiality and recalls medieval

fortifications. High above the city, on the bridge itself, the

anchorage presents a third face that is scaled to humans. Atop




-: -::::::: ,,:: :::,

FIGURE 9: View of the Philadelphia anchorage, Delaware River Bridge, c. 1921. With

the granite cladding removed, the cables, H-bent, eyebars, and concrete foundations

of the anchorage are visible.

the span, the rusticated rough-cut granite of the lower anchor-

age vanishes and a smooth-cut stone facade comes into focus.

Moving up the open approach ramp and onto the anchorage, travelers are overcome by a sensation of entering a domestic

interior, a foyer perhaps. The view of the river and the city, which only seconds earlier was unlimited, is now closed off.

Sheltered by a screening wall pierced with fretted windows, commuters are ensconced in a granite room, open to the sky, 100 feet above the city. At the pedestrian level above the

roadway, thin steel walkways open at the anchorage onto

granite alcoves with raised seating areas. Ornamented portals, bracketed by bronze lanterns, lead to elevators in the anchor-

age towers, adding to the domestic impression. Protected from

the wind by a high parapet, each open-air nook looks inward

across the roadway toward its twin. Above the traffic, the stone

towers, which from below resemble medieval bastions, appear as elegant pieces of furniture, even as art deco armoires

(Figure 11). Although integral to the complex bridge machin-

ery, the masonry anchorage has been transformed by the

architect into a place of domesticity. It is a house for retention

and protention, a threshold between Pennsylvania and New

Jersey, between engineering and architecture, and between

what has been, what is, and what will be.

In 1938 the architect Aymar Embury II, who offered the

only substantive critique of the DRB, labeled Cret's anchorage a "failure" and concluded that "it might be a magnificent warehouse or a superb old fortress but it is certainly not an

anchorage."103s Unwittingly Embury had discerned and then

dismissed Cret's intention. His clothed anchorage is, in fact, both a warehouse and a fortress; it preserves and protects the

art of architecture. Counteracting the force of the cables, the

grounding anchorage houses and limits architecture, prevent-

ing it from sliding toward the river and dissolving entirely into

engineering and the present.

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FIGURE 10: Paul Cret, preliminary design for Philadelphia anchorage, Delaware River Bridge, 1921. In the final design, the porch on the elevator tower was replaced by a sculpted

coat of arms.




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FIGURE I 1: View of the roadway, pedestrian walkway, and elevator tower from atop an anchorage of the Delaware River Bridge, c. 1921

In the same essay, Embury illustrated two anchorage de-

signs for New York City's Triborough Bridge (1936). The first, executed by an earlier design team of which Embury was not a

member, closely resembled the DRB anchorage. Embury noted

that this earlier design "didn't look to us like an anchorage for

a bridge but rather like an 1870 Post Office unfortunately located in the flats, although anchorages of this type were

quite the thing in the old days."104 Discarding the first design,

Embury, along with engineer Allston Dana, a member of the

DRB design team, executed a second scheme (Figure 12), of

which they wrote: "We wanted our anchorage to look like an

anchorage and nothing else. ... [T]his design was made with-

out reference to any precedent--either architectural or engi-

neering-solely to interpret the functions of the anchor-

age."'05 In asserting that he had translated function directly into form, Embury claimed that his anchorage design eluded

convention, habit, and the past. His architecture was strictly of

the present; it was pure technology. Implicit in these claims

was the assumption that the progress of technology was deter-

ministic and therefore, unlike conventional architecture, freed

from the burden of memory. But Embury and Dana's anchor-

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FIGURE 12: Aymar Embury II and Allston Dana, anchorage, Triborough Bridge, New

York City, 1935. Rendered by A. G. Lorimar

age did, in fact, remember.106 It referred to aerodynamics, to

streamlining, a science of movement that is counter to the

function of the stationary anchorage.'07 Their unexecuted

anchorage design for the George Washington Bridge, illus-

trated in the same article, reveals more emphatically the




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FIGURE 13: Aymar Embury II and Allston Dana, unexecuted anchorage design,

George Washington Bridge, New York City, mid- 1930s. Lithograph by John Richard

Rowe

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FIGURE 14: Leon Hermant, model of tower, Delaware River Bridge, c. 1925

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FIGURE 15: John A. Roebling, engineer, side and front elevations of a tower, Brooklyn

Bridge, New York City, I 870

paradoxical nature of memorializing streamlining in the ma-

sonry housing of a steadfast anchorage (Figure 13). While

attempting to seize the present through an appeal to an

emphatically modern technology, Embury frustrated any claim

of architecture to elude history and move with time. In fact, his

anchorages unwittingly asserted that every construction marks a

particular present and memorializes that moment for all time.

With his designs for the DRB, Cret sought to dramatize this

relationship between building and time. While the static an-

chorages visually and functionally embody the construction's

links to tradition, memory, and the past, the dynamic towers

signify its tie to novelty and the present. Engineered by Moisseiff, the DRB towers were innovative in their use of both

silicon steel and a cellular construction technique and became

the paradigm for modern suspension bridge towers (Figure 14).108 Because of its inherent flexibility, this modern tower

type offered an enormous advantage over older unyielding

masonry towers such those of the Brooklyn Bridge (Figure 15). Standing firm, the earlier towers resisted change; they were unable to adjust to fluctuations in the suspended cable




and deck structures. To overcome this problem, nineteenth-

century engineers employed a device called a rolling saddle, which was designed to bear the cable at the tower and to shift it toward the side or center spans depending on variations in

loading and environmental conditions. Unfortunately, due to the enormous frictional forces within the saddle, bridges equipped with this unwieldy system were never able to adjust promptly to changing burdens. Instead, they retained their

configurations for a while before convulsing into equilibrium as the frictional forces were abruptly overcome. Such a convul-

sion, Modjeski recorded in 1923, had recently caused "consid-

erable, though unnecessary alarm" at the Brooklyn Bridge.'09 By fixing the cables rigidly to the elastic steel towers in his

designs for the DRB, Moisseiff overcame the flaw in the older towers. His steel towers flex like trees in the wind as they adjust to changing conditions. "The total bending at the top of the

towers," Modjeski explained, "will be 21? inches toward the main span and 1512 inches toward the shore under extreme conditions of loading and temperature."'11 As they adapt to their changing environment, the dynamic towers, unlike the

anchorages, move with time.

Furthermore, the powerful, stark steel towers of the DRB

appeared to be free of architectural conventions. Their de-

sign, the engineers asserted, was "purely a matter of practical

engineering."'11 Unlike the masonry-clad towers proposed by Othmar Ammann and Cass Gilbert in the twenties for the

George Washington Bridge, the DRB towers looked forward, not back."112 Modjeski resisted the "temptation to disguise the real function of the [DRB] towers by covering them with shells of masonry. Such shells, being useless, cannot be considered

good engineering.""3 Cret concurred, declaring that the DRB towers "are not ashamed of being built of steel, and are not trying to conceal it under a masonry cloak."'114

When the DRB's Board of Engineers submitted the bridge design to the Philadelphia Art Jury, they included only those sections of the bridge that they perceived as architecture: the

plans for the pedestrian and automobile approach routes, the

anchorage, and the masonry base of the tower.115 No overtly ferrous elements of the design were submitted for judgment

despite the fact that the "monumental and magnificent towers

of heavy steel members were actually drawn by Cret and the

design approved by Ralph Modjeski.""6 Unlike the anchor-

ages, which both materially and figuratively embodied stasis

and resisted change, the towers ostensibly moved both physi-

cally and morphologically with time. But while the towers

claimed immediacy, they were, of course, never entirely free of

convention or the past, even within their own set of assump- tions. Moisseiff himself noted:

Longitudinally the profile of the tower was determined by consider-

ations of strength and looks. From the point of view of strength and

:--Bi"

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lo?i=!i

FIGURE 16: View of the tower pedestal, Delaware River Bridge, c. 1922. Note that

the granite cladding of the pedestal mirrors the anchorage in the distance.

economy it was desirable to have a slender column. .... From the point

of view of appearance, the tower should present a wide base producing

the effect of broad stability. The adopted profile balances well the static

and aesthetic requirements. ... Here again the good appearance of the

bridge was obtained at the expense of some economy, and here again

the results obtained fullyjustify the profile chosen."7

While the towers of the DRB appeared simply as a product of the latest structural engineering design technology, their de-

signers were, at least in part, guided by an aesthetic preference for antique classicism, in which strength and the appearance of strength were easily fused. As they loomed over the oldest sections of the brick and cobblestone city, the 380-foot-tall silicon steel structures projected an image of

modernity. Opposite the traditional anchorages, they personi- fied the transitory present in Cret's allegorical production of time.

Projecting an image of modernity, the towers veil their reliance on an ancient aesthetic tradition. With his designs for the towers, Cret countered the tendency toward forgetfulness, placing the muscular steel structures on granite pedestals that rise above the high water line in the Delaware River and mirror the rough-cut granite of the anchorages (Figure 16). As




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FIGURE 17: Othmar Ammann, chief engineer, Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, New York

City, 1936-1939. The rendering, by A. G. Lorimar, depicts the bridge as it looked

before the stays and truss were added in the early 1940s.

they stand midstream resisting the current and joining the

flexible steel towers to the solid rock of the riverbed, Cret's

pedestals call into question any claims of modernity liberated

from tradition or, analogously, of engineering liberated from

architecture. The granite pedestals for the DRB towers medi-

ate the static and dynamic as well as architecture and engineer-

ing, thereby opening a space for collaboration. Maintaining that boundaries such as the pedestals simultaneously link and

limit, Cret asserted that structural engineering, a modern

speciality, was constituted only in the collaborative embrace of

architecture. Without architecture, engineering would be, as it

had been, simply building. Like Cret, Clement Chase, the engineer who collaborated

on the design for the "massive granite masonry," spoke of

limits: "The proportioning of the mass was most carefully studied in relation to the design of the steel shaft of the tower

that was to surmount it. As in all other parts of this structure, the attempt has been made to adopt that design which, within

the limits of good engineering, would have the greatest archi-

tectural merit."118 In collaboration, architecture and engi-

neering work together to produce one another."19 For Cret,

engineering was more than "a goad and conscience to archi-

tects who were ... too prone to forget the realities of construc-

tion and materials."'20 Engineering and architecture inhabit

each other, and in this loss of identity, identity is produced; the

new art of structural engineering is never "fully independent of architecture."'21

Late in life, in an introduction to Wilbur J. Watson's A

Decade of Bridges, 1926-1936, Cret quoted "a great engineer":

"Large masonry arches are constructed out of the knowledge

gained from existing arches. It is a matter of experience." To

the great engineer's acknowledgment of the role of the past in

the present, Cret added: "Without a solid basis of examples tested by time, with their merits and faults stimulating our

critical faculties and challenging our ability to go a step farther, modern problems would find us helpless. Engineering, like

any other science or art, is a sum of past efforts much more

than an individual creation."122 Cret's "great engineer" was

fellow Frenchman Paul Sejourne, a chief engineer of the

Corps des Ponts et Chauss(es and a professor at the Ecole des

Ponts et Chaussies. This was not the first time that Cret had let

the engineer speak for him.'23 In 1931 he allowed Sejourne to

articulate his intuitions about bridges and time: "Paul Se-

journe, having designed his masterly bridge at Luxembourg

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FIGURE 18: The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Washington, in ruins, 7 November 1940




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FIGURE 19: An anonymous artist astutely portrayed the Delaware River Bridge as an agreement of things that disagree for a 1922 newspaper advertisement

with its twin arches connected by the deck supporting the

roadway, found later that this same principle had been used in

the south of France during the XIIth Century. In his book, Les

Grandes Vojites, can be found his terse comment, 'On croit

inventer, on retrouve.' "124 For Cret, architecture stood at the

nexus of invention and recovery. In his designs for the DRB, he endeavored to invent and recover, to look forward and

back, to reveal the productive, tragic nature of antinomy.

AN AFTERTHOUGHT-THE UTILITY OF HISTORY

In the late 1930s two suspension bridges-Moisseiff's Tacoma

Narrows Bridge (1940) and Ammann, Moisseiff, Dana, and

Embury's Bronx-Whitestone Bridge (1939) (Figure 17)- advanced the trajectory that runs from the Manhattan Bridge

through the DRB. Stressing the deflection theory to its limits, and perhaps beyond, these designers stiffened their bridge decks with sleek plate girders instead of bulkier trusses like those of the DRB. Ammann wanted his Bronx-Whitestone

Bridge to be "smooth, sharp, and clean," to be "devoid of

extraneous architectural embellishments."125 Embury likewise

boasted that "the very simplicity of the design of this [Bronx- Whitestone Bridge] anchorage carries out the 'feel' of the steel towers and stiffening girders."126 In both bridges, architecture collapsed into engineering.

On 7 November 1940 the sleek girders of Moisseiff's Ta-

coma Narrows Bridge dangled in the water, brought down by a stiff gale (Figure 18). Following the collapse, the Bronx-

Whitestone Bridge was quickly reinforced, first with a system of

stays like those used on mid-nineteenth-century bridges, and then with a truss like that of the DRB to stiffen the slender

deck.'27James Kip Finch, a professor of engineering at Colum- bia University, provided an astute analysis of this memorable

bridge failure, recounting the wind-induced collapses of Tho- mas Telford's Menai Straits Bridge, Wales, in 1839 and Charles Ellet Jr.'s Wheeling Bridge, West Virginia, in 1854 and the

subsequent introduction of the stiffening truss. In conclusion, he asserted: "In fact these long forgotten difficulties with early suspension bridges clearly show that while, to modern engineers, the gyrations of the Tacoma bridge constituted some-

thing entirely new and strange, they were not new-they had

simply been forgotten."128 In an editorial, the Engineering News-

Record agreed that "the difficulties encountered might have

been avoided if history had not been forgotten." 129But architects

and engineers had forgotten not only the history of failures

and the introduction of the corrective stiffening truss but also, in their rush to the future, they had forgotten time itself. The

deflection theory enumerated a static analysis; it did not

account for aerodynamic effects that occurred across time.130 The wind that destroyed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge gener- ated an oscillatory motion in the supple deck that grew over

time; the collapse demonstrated unforgettably that every present is linked abysmally, tragically, to distinct pasts and futures.

Had the desire to collapse architecture into engineering to

forget history actually led to the collapse of the Tacoma

Narrows Bridge? Bragdon warned that "in looking back the

architect is in danger of crystallization, [and] may turn, like

Lot's wife, to a pillar of salt."131 Against this restricting view, Cret countered that "the paradoxical attitude of mind which

combines a clear perception of the laws of progress with a stubborn tendency to look backward... [is] the source of

human power and of human weakness in equal parts."'132

Many years later, in his introduction to Watson's Decade of Bridges, he returned to this theme: "Where... collaboration

has been harmonious, you will find the most satisfactory

bridges"'133 (Figure 19).

Notes This essay was drawn from my doctoral dissertation for the School of

Architecture at Princeton University and profited from discussions with Georges Teyssot, Ralph Lerner, Guy Nordenson, Antoine Picon, Alessandra Ponte, and Mark Wigley. I am also indebted to Joan Ockman for the opportunity to

present a version of this paper during the 1997 Dissertation Colloquium at the

Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, and to Robert Bruegmann and WilliamJordy for their comments.

1 The Third Annual DRB Staff Dinner Seating Arrangement, Song Book and Program document the dinner. Delaware River Bridge Papers, Samuel Matthews Vauclain Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The Dela- ware River Bridge was renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge on 17 January 1955, the 250th anniversary of Franklin's birth.

2 In 1919, the year that Cret returned to Philadelphia after five years of

military service in France, American architects attempted to redefine them-




selves. Perceived as artists, not constructors, they had been excluded from the wartime building boom. The Post-War Committee of the American Institute of

Architects (AIA) attempted to reorder architects' priorities. The new "architect is first of all a business man; second, a constructor, and third, a dreamer of

dreams, or otherwise a designer," wrote C. H. Blackall, in "Architecture After the War: IV-What Is an Architect?," American Architect 115 (2 April 1919): 481.

During this period, architecture's alleged shift from the technology of construc-

tion toward the fine arts during the late nineteenth century was frequently, if

erroneously, attributed to the influence of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. For

examples of this point of view, see Paul Louis Bentel, "Idealism and Enterprise: Modernism and Professionalism in American Architecture, 1919-1933," Ph.D.

diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992, 116-117. Cret, however, was involved in many engineering projects. So numerous were his collaborative

designs for power stations, heating plants, dams, trains, and bridges that an observer once noted that "Cret n'est pas seulement un artiste, mais aussi un constructeur et un ing6nieur de talent" (Charles Duval, "Travaux r6cents de M. Paul Cret," L'Architecture 46 [15 March 1933]: 77).

For a brief overview of nineteenth-century "scientific" history in the United States, see the chapter "A Temporary Reassurance: Scientific History," in Ernst A. Breisach, American Progressive History: An Experiment in Modernization

(Chicago, 1993). 4 See Richard Michael Levy, "The Professionalization of American Archi-

tects and Civil Engineers, 1865-1917," Ph.D. diss., University of California,

Berkeley, 1980.

5 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (London,

1927), 17. First published as "Esth6tique de l'ing6nieur architecture," L'Esprit nouveau 11/12 (November 1921): 1328-1335. Not surprisingly, Cret, who often

quoted Le Corbusier, owned a copy of Vers une architecture. See Elizabeth

Greenwell Grossman, The Civic Architecture of Paul Cret (Cambridge, 1996), 254 n. 46.

6See Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), 147-152. Giedion's schism thesis was

initially developed in his 1928 book Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in

Eisenbeton; see Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferrocon-

crete, trans. J. Duncan Berry (Santa Monica, 1995), 94-96. Giedion placed a

photograph by Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy of Ferdinand Arnodin's Pont Transbor- deur in Marseilles of 1905 on the cover of Bauen in Frankreich and an image of Othmar Ammann's Randall's Island Interchange of the Triborough Bridge in NewYork City of 1936 on the dust jacket of Space, Time and Architecture.

7 Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 117. 8 On the notion of the bridge as site and metaphor, see the proceedings of a

symposium held by the Building Arts Forum/New York, Deborah Gans, ed.,

Bridging the Gap: Rethinking the Relationship of Architect and Engineer (New York, 1991).

9 Archibald Henderson, "In Praise of Bridges," Harper's Monthly Magazine 121 (November 1910): 925-927. The notion that bridges made progress manifest was common in the engineering discourse of the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries. For example, Frank Koester, a German city planner who lived and worked in the United States, wrote: "Of all the structures erected, the bridge is possessed of the greatest individuality, unity and feeling. It is at once an inspiration and a utility, and it marks as no other structure does the progress of man from barbarism to civilization" (Koester, Modern City Planning and Maintenance [New York, 1914], 98). See also K. Waule, "The

Bridge as a Test of Civilization," Scientific American Monthly 3 (March 1921): 201-204. Two recent publications explore the linkage between bridges and

progress: Richard Margolis, Bridges: Symbols ofProgress (Hamilton, N.Y., 1991); and Philip P. Mason, The Ambassador Bridge: A Monument to Progress (Detroit, 1987).

10 E. C. Gardner, "The Architecture of Bridge Building," Engineering Maga- zine 11 (August 1896): 844.

1 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 42; first published as "Trois Rappels A MM. Les Architectes, 2e Article," L'Esprit nouveau 2 (November 1920): 195-199.

12 Claude Bragdon, "Towards a New Architecture," Outlook 148 (15 Febru-

ary 1928): 246. Ostensibly a review of Thomas E. Tallmadge's The Story of Architecture in America and Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture, Bragdon's article all but ignores these books for his own preoccupations. Bragdon collaborated with Canadian engineer Frank Barber on several concrete bridges

in the Toronto area in the teens and early twenties. See Claude Bragdon, "Abstract Thoughts on Concrete Bridges," Architectural Record 53 (January 1923): 10.

13 Cret noted that he had called for "a new classicism" in 1925. See Cret, "Ten Years of Modernism," Architectural Forum 59 (August 1933): 94.

This reading of Cret's theory and practice of architecture as an attempt to reconcile tradition with modernity coincides with the work of noted Cret scholars Elizabeth Greenwell Grossman and Marc Vincent. See Grossman, The Civic Architecture of Paul Cret; and Vincent, " 'Natura Non Facit Saltus': The Evolution of Paul Cret's Architectural Theory," Ph.D. diss., University of

Pennsylvania, 1994. Vincent also addressed issues of tradition and change in "An Intense Impression of Modern Life: Paul Cret in America" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, Baltimore, 18 April 1997).

14 Alfred Pancoast Boller, "Engineering Architecture," Journal of the Franklin Institute 57 (May 1869): 320.

15 Calvin M. Woodward, "The Relation of Technical to Liberal Education,"

Proceedings, Association ofEngineering Societies 14 (April 1895): 362. 16 Ibid., 361-362. The figure of speech, facing into and turning from time,

was common. For example, Louis Gibson wrote: "The architect and the

engineer stand back to back. The architect has the ages for his vista ... but his vision is blinded and he sees no more after the sixteenth century. The engineer has his face turned the other way. His inspiration is the future. The past does not cloud his brain" (Gibson, "Art and Engineering," American Architect and

Building News 84 [28 May 1904]: 71).

17 On the historical relationships between theories of technological change and theories of history, see Merrit Roe Smith and Leo Marx, Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass.,

1994). 18 Charles S. Whitney, Bridges: A Study in Their Art, Science and Evolution (New

York, 1929), 23.

19 Leopold Eidlitz, "The Vicissitudes of Architecture," Architectural Record 1

(1891/1892): 477-479. In the late nineteenth century, Eidlitz, Henry Van

Brunt, Montgomery Schuyler, and others posited a correlation between an architectural pedagogy based upon the study of historical forms and the failure of architects to create a style for the present.

20 Henry Van Brunt, in a discussion ofJ. A. L. Waddell, "Elevated Railroads"

(1897), in John Lyle Harrington, ed., The Principal Papers ofDr J. A. L. Waddell, Civil Engineer (New York, 1905), 761. Waddell, one of the most prominent bridge engineers in the United States, was an early consultant to the DRB

project. Van Brunt was the first to translate into English Viollet-le-Duc's Entretiens sur l'architecture; see Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Discourses on Architecture of Eugne-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, trans. Henry Van Brunt (Boston, 1875). He also wrote the first important essay on bridge aesthetics by an American architect. See Henry Van Brunt, "A Letter on the Aesthetics of

Bridge Construction," in J. A. L. Waddell, De Pontibus: A Pocket-Book for Bridge Engineers (New York, 1898), 40-45; reprinted in Waddell, Bridge Engineering, 2:1151-1154.

21 On the prehistory of the DRB, see Delaware River Bridge Joint Commis- sions of the States of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Final Report of the Board of Engineers (Burlington, N.J., 1927), 5; Charles Carswell, The Building of the Delaware River Bridge (Burlington, N.J., 1926); "Historical Background," in

Delaware River Bridge Joint Commission of the States of Pennsylvania and

NewJersey, Delaware River Bridge Twenty-Fifth Anniversary, 1951 (Philadelphia, 1951), 19-24; Walter S. Andariese, History of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge (Camden, 1981). For a bibliography of the writings on the numerous attempts to span the Delaware at Philadelphia, see "Philadelphia-Camden Bridge," in A. A.Jakkula, ed., "A History of Suspension Bridges in Bibliographical Form," Bulletin of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas 12 (1 July 1941): 289-294.

22 Between 1906 and 1920, architect Joseph Huston promoted numerous

projects to span the Delaware River at Philadelphia. His extravagant bridge designs combined cantilever or suspension spans with enormous skyscrapers. Huston, who wasjailed during the teens for defrauding the State of Pennsylva- nia while designing a new state capitol building, was never seriously considered to design the bridge. While Huston played no official role on the bridge, the

nationally known engineerJ. A. L. Waddell of Chicago was retained to execute

preliminary plans. On 26June 1917 Waddell issued his "Preliminary Report




and Estimate of Cost of Delaware River Bridge Between Philadelphia and Camden"; five months later, on 17 November 1917, he issued his pendant "Report of Estimate of Cost on Two Tunnels under the Delaware River Between Philadelphia, Penn. and Camden, N.J." Waddell proposed an eyebar suspension bridge with unorthodox spiral approaches. Both reports were

published as J. A. L. Waddell, Report to the Delaware River Bridge and Tunnel Commission on the Proposed Bridge and Tunnel Between the Cities of Camden and

Philadelphia (Camden, 1918). The legislation granting authority to fund and build the bridge during the teens is detailed in the booklet The Delaware River

Bridge Linking Philadelphia and Camden: Authorized by Acts of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Legislatures and Ordinances of the Philadelphia City Council (Camden, 1921).

23 Laird had recruited Paul Cret and brought him from Paris to teach at the

university in 1903. See David Van Zanten, "Le Systime des Beaux-Arts," Architectural Design Profile 17 (1979): 70.

24 Warren Powers Laird, "The Placement of the Proposed Bridge over the Delaware River Between the Cities of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Camden,

NewJersey" (1919), 16. Documentation of Laird's work on the DRB project is housed in Warren Powers Laird Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

25 See "Engineers Request Experts Be Put on Bridge Commission," Philadel-

phia Public Ledger, 24 November 1919, p. 3. 26 Cram's lecture of 10 July 1918 was summarized in "Pittsburgh Urged to

Plan Now," American Architect 114 (17July 1918): 80. 27 The Allegheny County Commissioners retained Benno Janssen for the

40th Street Bridge, Alden & Harlow for the Monongahela River Bridge, and Warren and Wetmore for the 16th Street Bridge over the Allegheny River. See "Architects Design Pittsburgh's Bridges," American Architect 115 (25June 1919): 886; and "Pittsburgh Asks Architects' Aid in Designing Bridges," Engineering News-Record 82 (12 June 1919): 1180. John W. Beatty reported Cram's lecture and his successful lobbying to his allies at the Philadelphia ArtJury. SeeJohn W.

Beatty to Andrew Wright Crawford, Secretary of the Philadelphia Art Jury, 7

June 1919, Fairmount Park Art Association Collection, Historical Society of

Pennsylvania. Note that BennoJanssen was a member of the competition jury that selected Cret's design for the Indianapolis Public Library in 1914.

28 "What of the Public Safety in Pittsburgh?" Engineering News-Record 83

(9 October 1919): 686. 29 "A Better Inter-Professional Relation Needed," American Architect 116

(31 December 1919): 814. On the AIA Post-War Committee, see n. 2. 30 Cret's associate Clarence Zantzinger was a member of the Pennsylvania

State Art Commission. 31 The letter was reprinted and abstracted in numerous Philadelphia newspa-

pers, including "The Art Commission Warns Against Bridge Errors," Philadel-

phia Public Ledger, 26January 1920, p. 9; "Ask for Architect to Design Bridge," Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 January 1920, p. 2; "Beauty in Bridge, Art Board's Plea," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, 26 January 1920, p. 9. The issue was then picked up by the national engineering press. See "Wants Architects to Control Delaware Bridge," Engineering News-Record 84 (29January 1920): 250.

32 "Engineers Laugh at Architects' 'Ego' on Bridge Matter," Philadelphia Public Ledger, 29January 1920, p. 1.

33The resolution of the Society of Municipal Engineers was reprinted in

"Why Engineers Should Be Put in Charge of Big Bridges," Engineering News- Record 84 (26 February 1920): 435-436.

34 See, for example, "More About the Bridge," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, 30 January 1920, p. 10; John Irwin Bright, "Should Bridge Builder Be Engineer or Architect?," Philadelphia Public Ledger, 29 February 1920, p. 4; Clarence W. Brazer, "Favors Bridge Competition," Philadelphia Public Ledger, 6 March 1920, p. 8, reprinted as "Architectural Aspects of Bridge Building," American Architect 117 (7 April 1920): 438; "Open Competition for Delaware River Bridge Suggested," Engineering News-Record 84 (18 March 1920): 596.

35 The dissenting organizations included the Engineers' Club of Philadel- phia, the Engineers' Society of Western Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia chapters of the ASCE, and the American Institute of Consulting Engineers. See, for example, "Resolutions of Pittsburgh Engineers on Bridge Design by Architects," Engineering News-Record 84 (29January 1920): 223; and "Engineer Societies Resent Art Commission's Aspersion," Engineering News- Record84 (5 February 1920): 300.

36 See "Pittsburgh Civils Say Architects Should Not Design Bridges," Engi- neer-

ingNews-Record84 (11 March 1920): 544. 37 The report was reprinted in "Council Committee Reports on Pittsburgh

Bridge Case," EngineeringNews-Record 84 (27 May 1920): 1079. 38 The resolution by the Board of Direction of the ASCE condemning the

joint committee was published in "American Society Takes Issue with Council in Pittsburgh Bridge Case," Engineering News-Record 84 (10 June 1920): 1175-1176. The assessment of the resolution as "manful" was asserted in

"Speaking for the Profession," EngineeringNews-Record 84 (10 June 1920): 1134. Other condemnations of the joint committee's findings appeared in "An Unresponsive Answer," Engineering News-Record 84 (27 May 1920): 1038; and "Consulting Engineers Reaffirm Their Stand on Bridge Design by Architects," Engineering News-Record 84 (17June 1920): 1223. Francis C. Shenehon, one of the three engineers on the joint committee, attempted to rationalize his role on the condemned panel, in Francis C. Shenehon, "Crossover Practice: An Argument on the Issues of the Pittsburgh Bridge Case," EngineeringNews-Record 84 (24June 1920): 1254.

The question of whether architects or engineers were better suited to design large public bridges resurfaced in Pittsburgh in 1923 when John W. Beatty demanded that the proposed 6th, 7th, and 9th Street bridges be designed by an architect. The three suspension bridges were eventually erected by engineer V. R. Covell in collaboration with architect Stanley L. Roush. See "Architects'

Bridge Design Again Under Discussion," Engineering News-Record 91 (26 July 1923): 155, 157; "Bridge Design Dispute Initiated by Architects," Engineering News-Record 91 (2 August 1923): 195; and "Engineers for Bridges," Engineering News-Record 91 (16 August 1923): 251. The collaboration was discussed in

Stanley L. Roush, "The Sixth, Seventh and Ninth Street Bridges, Pittsburgh, PA.," American Architect 133 (5 February 1928): 191-196.

39 On the Bensalem Avenue Bridge, see "Bensalem Ave Bridge--An Essay in Ornamentation," Engineering News-Record 85 (16 September 1920): 559-561; "Bensalem Bridge to Open," Philadelphia Public Ledger, 28 August 1920, p. 3; and "Elaborate Concrete Bridge for Philadelphia Park," Engineering News 75 (29June 1916): 1248-1249.

4o0 Annual Report of the ArtJury (Philadelphia, 1920), 18. 41 "What Is Art?" Engineering News-Record 85 (16 September 1920): 531.

42John C. Trautwine Jr., "What Is Art?" Engineering News-Record 85 (23 September 1920): 619.

43 Rudolph Hering, "What Is Art?" Engineering News-Record 85 (30 Septem- ber 1920): 670. Born in Philadelphia, Hering, by 1867, had trained as a civil engineer at the Royal Polytechnical School in Dresden. His thesis was titled "Aesthetics Applied to Bridge Design." From 1876 to 1880 he worked for the

city of Philadelphia with George S. Webster as the assistant engineer in charge of bridges and sewers.

44 "What Is Art?" American Architect 118 (20 October 1920): 501-502. 45 Two letters-N. H. Holmes, "What Is Art?-A Defence of the Architect,"

Engineering News-Record 85 (21 October 1920): 810, and S. S. McKay, "What Is Art?-A Defence of the Architect," Engineering News-Record 85 (21 October 1920): 810-were reprinted in "What Is Art?" American Architect 118 (3 Novem- ber 1920): 568, 572. The exchange also included George E. Dorman, "The Worm Turns," EngineeringNews-Record 85 (18 November 1920): 1006; and F. H. Frankland, "What Is Art?" EngineeringNews-Record 85 (2 December 1920): 1105.

46 George Sydney Binckley, "Art in Structures," Engineering News-Record 85 (25 November 1920): 1025.

47 See, for example, Warren Powers Laird, "The Placement of the Delaware River Bridge," Journal of the Engineers' Club of Philadelphia 36 (June 1919): 209-219.

48Warren Powers Laird, "Dr. Warren P. Laird on the Delaware River

Bridge," Philadelphia EveningPublic Ledger, 15 September 1920, p. 8.

49 The three engineers were named to the board on 24 September 1920. See "Engineers Named by Bridge Body," Philadelphia Public Ledger, 25 September 1920, p. 3; "3 Engineers Named for Bridge Project," Philadelphia Inquirer, 25 September 1920, p. 2; "Engineering Board Appointed for Delaware River Bridge," American Architect 118 (27 October 1920): 554; and "Philadelphia- Camden Bridge Study Makes Progress," Engineering News-Record 85 (2 Decem- ber 1920): 1108. Webster had served the city of Philadelphia for more than four decades and had headed the design team of the much maligned Bensalem Avenue Bridge. Ball was an engineer from NewJersey. Design engineer Leon Moisseiff, the leading American theoretician of the computational analysis of suspension bridges, and principal assistant engineer Clement E. Chase, among




others, were appointed on 29 September 1920. Engineer Allston Dana did not

join the team until September 1921.

50 On Cret's Pan American Union Building, designed and constructed in collaboration with Philadelphia architect Albert Kelsey between 1907 and 1910, see "The Pan American Union Building Competition: A Lesson in Beaux-Arts

Design," in Grossman, Civic Architecture, 26-64.

51 George S Webster, one of the three members of the Board of Engineers, had worked with Cret on numerous occasions. For example, Webster, the director of the Board of Surveys of Philadelphia's Department of Public Works from 1892 to 1916, was an ex officio member of the Art Jury and the Permanent Committee on Comprehensive Plans. On Cret and the parkway, see David B. Brownlee, Building the City Beautiful: The Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the Philadelphia Museum ofArt (Philadelphia, 1989).

52 Cret's military career was outlined in dozens of articles in Philadelphia newspapers between 1914 and 1919. The city considered asking the French

government to release Cret from military duty in 1918 so that he might continue his city-planning projects. The article "Art and Artists and War Memorial," Philadelphia Public Ledger, 24 November 1918, p. 18, showcased sketches for Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square that Cret had executed "in the trenches" and also proposed that the soldier-architect design the Delaware River Bridge as a war memorial. The city welcomed the "hero-architect" home on 1 April 1919. See, for example, "Penn Professor First over Rhine," Philadel-

phia Public Ledger, 2 April 1919, p. 3.

53 On Cret's Detroit Institute of Arts, designed and constructed in association with Zantzinger, Borie & Medary between 1919 and 1927, see "The Detroit Institute of Arts: The Art Museum between History and Pleasure," in Gross- man, Civic Architecture, 102-139.

54 Paul Cret to Ralph Modjeski, 26 November 1920, Paul P. Cret Collection, Athenaeum of Philadelphia.

55 A status report was issued by the Board on 15 April 1921; see "Philadelphia- Camden Bridge to Have Clearance of 135 Ft," Engineering News-Record 86 (28 April 1921): 740. The preliminary design of June 1921 was published as Delaware River BridgeJoint Commission of the States of Pennsylvania and New

Jersey, Final Report of the Board of Engineers (Burlington, N.J., 1921). The bridge design appeared on the front page of every local newspaper on 10June 1921. A cartoon of Ben Franklin astride the bridge above the caption "Dreams Do Come True" represented the public sentiment; see Philadelphia Inquirer, 12

June 1921, p. 1. During the summer of 1921 the bridge was also widely publicized nationwide in the popular and professional presses. After the design was presented by the Board of Engineers in June 1921, public forums on the

bridge were held for several weeks. The most contentious issue debated during these meetings was not the design itself but the location of the bridge.

56 The ground-breaking ceremonies were reported extensively in the local

press on 6 and 7January 1922; see, for example, "Special Section on Bridge Ceremonies," Philadelphia EveningPublic Ledger, 6January 1922, pp. 20-22. The final design of the bridge is best documented in DRB Joint Commission, Final Report of 1927. In addition to the final engineers' report, contract drawings for every aspect of the bridge were issued by the same body between 1921 and 1926 in approximately thirty-six separate books. The design was documented in dozens of publications, the most important of which are Clement E. Chase, "The Main Piers of the Bridge Over the Delaware River, Between Philadelphia and Camden: Design," Journal of the Franklin Institute 196 (November 1923): 593-608; Allston Dana, "The Anchorages of the Bridge Over the Delaware River Between Philadelphia and Camden: Design of the Anchorages," Journal of the Franklin Institute 198 (September 1924): 291-313; Ralph Modjeski, "The Delaware River Bridge Between Philadelphia and Camden," Journal of the Franklin Institute 193 (January 1922): 1-14; and Leon S. Moisseiff, "The Towers, Cables and Stiffening Trusses of the Bridge Over the Delaware River Between

Philadelphia and Camden," Journal of the Franklin Institute200 (October 1925): 436-466. The construction of the bridge was documented most thoroughly in a series of twenty-four articles that appeared in the Journal oftheEngineers' Club of Philadelphia, sometimes titled Engineers and Engineering, between January 1923 and October 1925. A photographic history of the construction of the bridge was presented in American Cable Company, Inc., The World's Greatest Suspension Bridge, Philadelphia to Camden: The Part Played in Its Construction by the American Cable Company, Inc. (NewYork, 1926).

57 The single-span record, 1,750 feet, did not last long. The Ambassador

Bridge, constructed from 1927 to 1929 over the Detroit River from Detroit to

Windsor, Ontario, by the architectural firm of Smith, Hinchman and Grylls and engineers Jonathan Jones and Leon Moisseiff, design engineer of the DRB, broke the record with a span of 1,850 feet. See Mason, The Ambassador Bridge.

The completed bridge was the subject of numerous reports. See, for

example, Clement E. Chase, "The Delaware River Bridge," American Architect 131 (5 March 1927): 329-335; and Harold Donaldson Eberlein, "The Dela- ware River Bridge Between Philadelphia and Camden," Architectural Record 61

(January 1927): 1-12. The history of the bridge subsequent to its completion is delineated in DRB Joint Commissions, DRB Twenty-Fifth Anniversary; Jack Cur-

tin, "The Story of a Bridge, 1926-1966," Ports of Philadelphia Magazine (June 1966): 17-20; and Andariese, History of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

58 The end of Cret's tenure on the bridge project on 31 August 1927 is documented by letters between Modjeski and Cret. Ralph Modjeski to Paul Cret; Paul Cret to Ralph Modjeski, 31 August 1927, Paul P. Cret Collection, Athenaeum of Philadelphia.

59 On Modjeski, see Frank M. Masters, "Memoir of Ralph Modjeski," Trans- actions of the American Society of Engineers 106 (1941): 1624-1628; and "Ralph Modjeski," Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 23 (1945): 243-261.

60 On the relationships between French engineers and architects in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see, respectively, Antoine Picon, French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment, trans. Martin Thom (Cam-

bridge, 1992); and H6lkne Lipstadt and Harvey Mendelsohn, Architecte and inginieur dans la presse: polnmique, dtbat, conflit (Paris, 1980). More generally, see Antoine Picon, "Introduction," to L'Art de l'inginieur: constructeur, entrepreneur, inventeur, ed. Antoine Picon (Paris, 1997), 22-40.

The schism is identified with the founding of the Ecole des Ponts et

Chauss6es in 1747. Peter Collins noted "that about 1750 a division took place between the two professions. Before 1750 no one would have questioned the

advisability of appointing architects to design bridges, or suggested that the

design was the responsibility of any other type of person" (Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture [London, 1965], 185). Giedion associated the

disciplinary break with the French Revolution and the creation of the Ecole

Polytechnique in 1794. "The separate existence of an Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Ecole Polytechnique in itself points to the schism between architecture and construction" (Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 147).

Often the schism was characterized as a split between engineering and art rather than architecture. Architecture was then perceived as the vehicle for reconciling beauty and utility, aesthetics and construction, and art and engineering. See Charles H. Driver, "Engineering and Art," Van Nostrand's Engineering Magazine 20 (June 1879): 487: "Can Engineering and Art be united, and if so, how? My answer is, yes, and by means ofArchitecture; for though, as I have said, Architecture is to be considered the child of Engineering, yet it is through the graces of that child that we must hope to again reconcile and unite Art with engineering. I say 'again reconcile,' for in the old days Art and Engineering were united, and Architecture was their offspring. We moderns have divorced them; let us re-unite them."

61 Paul Cret, "Lecture notes for Modern Architecture, 16 May 1921," Paul P. Cret Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Pennsylvania.

62 Paul Cret, "Modern Architecture," in The Significance of the Fine Arts

(Boston, 1923), 214. 63 Paul Cret, "The Architect as Collaborator with the Engineer," Architectural

Forum 49 (July 1928): 97. As late as 1937, Cret wrote: "Before the divorce of architecture and engineering, which took place in the middle of the XVIIIth

Century, the French students of the Ecole des Ponts et Chauss6es either received a first training in an architect's office before specializing for the

government service, or were requested, while in the School, to attend a course in Architecture, given at that time by the famous architect, FranCois Blondel"

(Cret, "Introduction" to Wilbur J. Watson, A Decade of Bridges, 1926-1936 [Cleveland, 1937], n.p.).

64 H. D. Eberlein, "The Delaware River Bridge," 2. Other examples include a 1925 article stating that "upon the matter of the towers alone Dr. Crete [sic] made hundreds and hundreds of sketches. He worked with Mr. Modjeski and his engineering staff for months to combine beauty of line with the strength and durability which it was necessary, first of all, to put into every part of the

bridge" ("Architecture of Giant Bridge a Carefully Considered Point," Building 5 [June 1925]: 14). A local journalist recorded that "Mr. Modjeski evidently discovered in Mr. Cret a good team mate, one who could express in aesthetic




terms what the engineer needs to perfect his work of strength and utility" ("The Men Who Made the Bridge Beautiful," Camden Courier, 5 July 1926, n.p.). The engineer Chase wrote that "the detail designing of the towers was a combined labor of the engineers and architects of theJoint Commission over a period of six months" (Chase, "The Delaware River Bridge," American Architect, 334).

65 Ralph Modjeski to Paul Cret, 31 August 1927, Paul P. Cret Collection, Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Emphasis added.

66 Paul Cret to Ralph Modjeski, 1 September 1927, Paul P. Cret Collection, Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Emphasis added.

Little of the day-to-day interaction between Modjeski's engineering team and Cret's architectural team is documented. A rare view of this collaboration was provided byJohn Harbeson, the principal associate at Cret's firm. On 30 December 1932, F.Julius Dreyfous, an architect from New Orleans, wrote Cret: "I am taking the further liberty of requesting your indulgence to advise me upon a point of professional practice which has arisen in connection with an important bridge project. My firm anticipates an association with the bridge engineers as consulting architects, both on architectural engineering and aesthetic design of the bridge and its approaches. Knowing that you were associated on the Delaware River Bridge, and other important projects of this nature, I would like to have you advise on what basis such an association is generally made as to the division of work, responsibility and fees." Because Cret was sick with influenza, Harbeson replied for him on 6 January 1933. Of the collaboration, he wrote: "At first, the engineers [of the DRB] wished all such [architectural] studies to be made in their office, but as the work proceeded, and they developed complete confidence in Mr. Cret's reasonableness, and especially found that he did not have the idea that an architect's work consisted in putting around a lot of irrelevant ornament, but solely in arranging the engineering materials in the best possible way, there was no friction, and the engineers came up once a week to discuss details" (Paul P. Cret Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Pennsylvania).

67 Cret designed the University Avenue Bridge in Philadelphia in 1927 and 1928. The bridge was featured in six full-page photographs in the photo essay "The University Bridge at Philadelphia," Architectural Record 68 (August 1930): 159-164.

68 Cret, "The Architect as Collaborator," 97. 69 Ibid. 70 Cret's notions of remembering and forgetting might be related profitably

to Viollet-le-Duc's notion of forgetfulness, which was elucidated in Martin Bressani, "Notes on Viollet-le-Duc's Philosophy of History: Dialectics and Technology," JSAH48 (December 1989): 327-350.

71 Cret, "The Architect as Collaborator," 98-99. Emphasis added. 72Ibid., 100-101. Emphasis added. 73Ibid., 103. Emphasis added. 74Ibid., 104. Emphasis added. 75Ibid., 101. 76 Ibid.

77For example, Carl Condit has asserted that the Manhattan Bridge de- buted the "structural system [that] remained substantially fixed for nearly twenty years" (Condit, American Building: Materials and Techniques from the First Colonial Settlement to thePresent [Chicago and London, 1968], 234. Leon Moisseiff, design engineer of the DRB, served as a designer of the Manhattan Bridge, and Ralph Modjeski, chief engineer of the DRB, served as a consultant to its design and construction. See Ralph Modjeski, City of New York, Department of Bridges, Manhattan Bridge: Report (New York, 1909). Three distinct designs were developed for the Manhattan Bridge between 1900 and its completion in 1909. Moisseiff, the chief draftsman of the Department of Bridges of the Borough of Manhattan, was involved in all three phases. The first, a wire cable suspension bridge, was executed around the turn of the century under engineer Richard S. Buck. The subsequent bridge commissioner, Gustav Lindenthal, discarded Buck's plan and created an eyebar design. He also commissioned Beaux-Arts architect Henry Hornbostel to decorate the bridge. The following commissioner, George Best, executed a third design that was similar to the original plan. Best engaged Carrare and Hastings to ornament this design. An explanation of the architects' design can be found in a letter to the Municipal Art Commission that was reprinted in "The Manhattan Bridge Across the East River, New York City: Revised Plans," Engineering News 52 (7 July 1904): 1-3; and "The Architectural Features of the Manhattan Bridge, NewYork," Engineer-

ing Record 50 (2 July 1904): 23-24. Between 1912 and 1917, Carrere and Hastings added an ornate arch and colonnade to the Manhattan plaza. See New York Department of Bridges, Contract Drawings for the Improvement of the Manhattan Plaza of the Manhattan Bridge (New York, 1912).

78 "The New Manhattan Bridge: A Bridge Beautiful as Well as Useful," Architects'and Builders'Magazine 5 (September 1904): 547-554.

79 DRBJoint Commissions, Final Report of 1921, 22. so0 Cret, "The Architect as Collaborator," 102. 81 Thomas Hastings, "The Relations of Life to Style in Architecture," Harp-

er's New Monthly Magazine 88 (May 1894): 962. 82 Cret presented his views on archaeology in a 1923 essay on modern

architecture. For example, he wrote: "Archaeology, in its effort to revive past civilizations, not only has its seduction for the intellectual interested in all things historical, but, by the publication of works illustrated with the results of these researches, it puts within reach of the public a whole repertory of forms, to borrow from which is a sore temptation" (Cret, "Modern Architecture," 203).

8s Bragdon, "Towards a New Architecture," 245. 84 Cret, "The Architect as Collaborator," 97. 85 Bragdon, "Towards a New Architecture," 246. 86 Both "garden" and "yard" derive from the Old English geard, meaning

enclosure. Also of interest is the related verb "to garth," meaning to enclose with a fence.

87 Note the late-nineteenth-century classic George A. Martin, Fences, Gates and Bridges (New York, 1887).

s Cret, "The Architect as Collaborator," 97. 89 Ibid. Cret was referring to a passage from Herbert Spencer's Autobiography,

in which, to prove Huxley's sense of humor, Spencer noted that Huxley once chided him for his proclivity toward speculation: Huxley "was one of a circle in which tragedy was the topic, when my name came up in connexion with some opinion or other; whereupon he remarked-'Oh! you know, Spencer's idea of tragedy is a deduction killed by a fact' " (Spencer, An Autobiography [New York, 1904], 1:467).

90 Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Utility and Liability of History for Life," in Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford, 1995), 87-88. Nietzsche was occasionally evoked by American engineers and their apologists. For example, Archibald Henderson proclaimed that " [in] this Age of Steel, in this vast country of America the new word for the new beauty is demanded. It is time for man, in the words of Nietzsche, to say Yea! to all the Universe" (Henderson, "In Praise of Bridges," 927).

91 Kenneth Frampton, in Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1995), 27, asserts: "Inasmuch as [architecture's] continuity transcends mortality, building provides the basis for life and culture. In this sense, its is neither high art nor high technology. To the extent that it defies time, it is anachronistic by definition. Duration and durability are its ultimate values." Cret, on the other hand, would have argued that it is precisely the human awareness of mortality, of the absolute limit of death, that compels the architect in the futile, eternal quest to reconcile art and technology. Architecture as such comes into existence in the gap between durability and impermanence, between timeless- ness and timeliness.

92 Othmar H Ammann, "George Washington Bridge: General Conception and Development of Design," Proceedings ofthe American Society of Civil Engineers 97 (October 1933): 46.

9 On Moisseiff, see Othmar H. Ammann and Frederick Lienhard, "Obitu- ary for Leon Solomon Moisseiff," Transactions of the American Society of Engineers 111 (1946): 1510. On the innovations, see Moisseiff, "Towers, Cables and Stiffening Trusses," Journal of the Franklin Institute, 446. Near the end of his distinguished career, Moisseiff reflected upon his role in the definition of suspension bridges: "The main reason why the Manhattan Bridge is so important to the discussion of the development of modern suspension bridges is that it was the first bridge to be proportioned and designed on the basis of the Deflection Theory" (Moisseiff, "Growth in Suspension Bridge Knowledge," Engineering News-Record 123 [17 August 1939]: 206-207). Modjeski's firm insisted that the technological advances in suspension-bridge design had taken place not at the Manhattan Bridge but at the DRB. "The greatest improve- ments in design, which led to our modern concept, were developed under Modjeski for the Delaware River Bridge at Philadelphia" (Modjeski and




Masters, "Suspension Bridges and Wind Resistance," Engineering News-Record

127 [23 October 1941]: 566).

94There is an enormous technical literature on deflection theory, which was

first proposed in 1888 by the Austrian engineer Josef Melan. See Melan, Handbuch derlngenieurwissenschaften, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1888); Leon S. Moisseiff,

"Theory and Formulas for the Analytical Computation of a Three-Span Suspension Bridge with Braced Cable," Transactions of the American Society of

CivilEngineers 55"(1905): 94-128; idem, "Towers, Cables and Stiffening Trusses,"

Journal of the Franklin Institute, 436-466; idem, "The Deflection Theory as

Applied to Suspension Bridges with Suspended Trusses," in DRBJoint Commis-

sion, Final Report of 1927, 96-105. On the relationship between mathematical

theory and aesthetics in American suspension-bridge design, see Jameson W.

Doig and David P. Billington, "Ammann's First Bridge: A Study in Engineering, Politics, and Entrepreneurial Behavior," Technology and Culture 35 (uly 1994): 537-570.

95 Unlike Laird and other architects, Cret accepted the dominance of the

engineer in collaborative bridge design. Of this sort of collaboration, he once wrote that "the engineer's part is undoubtably more important. The architect

may play second fiddle" (Cret, "Introduction" to Watson, n.p.). 96 Cret, "The Architect as Collaborator," 104. When the Board of Engineers

issued the preliminary plan for the DRB, they likewise declared that the design team had sought "to harmonize the steel construction with the stone work"

(DRBJoint Commission, Final Report of1921, 22). 97 Cret, "The Architect as Collaborator," 99.

98Modjeski, "The Delaware River Bridge," Journal of the Franklin Institute, 6.

99 The most complete discussion of the design of the anchorages can be found in Dana, "The Anchorages of the DRB," 291-313.

100 Chase, "The Delaware River Bridge," American Architect, 334. 101 Edward Hungerford, "The Weaving of the Bridge," Harper's Monthly

Magazine 119 (uly 1909): 230. 102 Cret, "The Architect as Collaborator," 104. 103 Aymar Embury II, "Esthetics of Bridge Anchorages," Civil Engineering 8

(February 1938): 88; also published as "The Aesthetics of Bridge Design," PencilPoints 19 (February 1938): 109-120.

104 Embury, "Aesthetics of Bridge Design," 112. 105 Embury, "Esthetics of Bridge Anchorages," 86. 106 HenryJ. Murphy pointed out that Embury's design for the Triborough

Bridge was both symbolic and aesthetic, not solely utilitarian. See Henry J. Murphy, "Letter to the Editor," PencilPoints 19 (May 1938): 307-308.

107 The term "streamline" was coined in 1865 by W.J. Rankine, an English engineer and professor of engineering at the University of Glasgow. In hydrody- namics and aerodynamics the streamline is used to represent the direction of flow in a fluid. At any point on that line, the direction of a tangent to that line is the direction of the flow of fluid at that point. The notion of streamlining migrated from discourses on the physical sciences to those on automobile

styling in the second decade of the twentieth century. See, for example, the

chapter "Streamlining and Full Mechanization" in Sigfried Giedion, Mechaniza- tion Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York, 1969), 607-611. Cret was involved in the design of streamlined railroad cars in the thirties and forties. See Cret, "Streamlined Trains," Magazine ofArt 30 (anuary 1937): 17-20; and idem, "Interior Streamlining," InteriorDesign and Decoration

17 (December 1941): 20-25, 41-42, 48, 50-51. The question of aerodynamics reappeared in bridge engineering after the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows

Bridge in Washington in 1940.

o108 Moisseiff pioneered the elastic steel bridge tower with his designs for the Manhattan Bridge and then perfected it during his work on the DRB. On the

origins of cellular construction at the DRB, see Tom F. Peters, "The Skyscrap- er's Many Origins," Domus 669 (February 1986): 27.

109 Modjeski noted that "[1]ast year a sudden sliding of the cables [of the

Brooklyn Bridge] took place, amounting to about 1/4", and causing consider-

able, though unnecessary alarm" (Modjeski, "Delaware River Bridge," Journal of the Western Society of Engineers, 236). The rolling saddle mechanisms of the

Brooklyn Bridge were intended to function as follows: At each junction of the cable and tower is mounted "a set of iron bed-plates, on which rest the 'saddles' in which the great suspension cables ride. These are iron castings in the form of a segment of a circle, with a groove to receive the cable on the upper and convex side. The under and plane side lies on a layer of small iron rollers held in place by flanges on the surface of the bed-plate. The object of these is to give

sufficient play to the bearings on which the cables rest to prevent the cables themselves slipping and chafing in the saddles if affected by the force of storms or variations of load, or when lengthening or contracting under changes of

temperature" (W. C. Conant, "The Brooklyn Bridge," Harper's New Monthly

Magazine 66 [May 1883]: 944). On the saddles, see also Montgomery Schuyler, "The Brooklyn Bridge as Monument," Harper's Weekly 27 (26 May 1883): 326.

110 Modjeski, "Delaware River Bridge," Journal of the Franklin Institute, 6. 111 DRBJoint Commission, Final Report of 1921, 21. 112 The earliest proposals for the George Washington Bridge appear in a

proposal by Othmar Ammann titled "Study of a Highway Bridge across the Hudson River at New York, between Washington Heights & Fort Lee" and dated 1 November 1923. It included a rough sketch for a bridge that incorpo- rated masonry-clad towers. This proposal contradicts the often-stated opinion that the "architectural" features of the bridge were originated by Cass Gilbert, the architect who developed numerous studies for the towers in the later twenties. See Governor George S. Silzer Papers, New Jersey State Archives,

Department of State. 113 Modjeski, "Delaware River Bridge,"Journal oftheEngineers'Club ofPhiladel-

phia, 2. 114 Paul Cret, "Bridges," Architectural Progress 4 (November 1930): 19.

115 In 1921 Modjeski notified the Bridge Commission: "In collaboration with Mr. Cret, the design for the pier itself above water has been developed and the first steps have been taken towards its submission to the Art Jury for the

necessary approval" (Modjeski to the Delaware River BridgeJoint Commission, 16 September 1921, Delaware River Bridge Papers, Samuel Vauclain Collec-

tion, Historical Society of Pennsylvania). For the actual DRB submission to the

ArtJury, see the ArtJury submission files 1053, "Delaware River Bridge Main

Spans, etc.," and 1054, "Masonry of the Main Piers," in Philadelphia ArtJury Papers, City Archive of Philadelphia. Both submissions were received on 22

September 1921 and approved on 23 December 1921. Of note is the fact that Cret was a member of the Philadelphia ArtJury from its founding in 1911 until his death in 1945. He was excused from considering any of his own projects.

116 Cret's role in the design of the towers was noted by Theo White, an architect in Cret's atelier, in his introduction to a collection of Cret's writings. See Theo B. White, ed., Paul Philippe Cret: Architect and Teacher (Philadelphia, 1973), 31.

117 Moisseiff, "Towers, Cables and Stiffening Trusses," Journal of the Franklin

Institute, 448. Like Moisseiff, Embury noted that his collaborative tower design for the Triborough Bridge had been guided by both structural and aesthetic

requirements. Stating that towers designed strictly for material efficiency "would have been awkward and ungainly, and might have even appeared weak to the general public, because of the slimness of the legs," Embury echoed

Moisseiffs predilection for towers that afforded both structural and visual

strength (Aymar Embury II, "Esthetic Design of Steel Structures," CivilEngineer- ing 8 [April 1938]: 262; also published as "Aesthetic Design of Steel Struc-

tures," PencilPoints 19 [September 1938]: 409-418). 118 Chase, "Main Piers of the DRB," 593. 119 Elizabeth Grossman has offered a cogent political explanation for Cret's

work: "For Cret, neither a static image of the past nor a functionalist view of the

future was appropriate for the complexity of civic responses required for a

republic" (Grossman, Civic Architecture, 210). Founded explicitly upon the

guarantee of individual rights, the United States exhibited unique tensions

between individuals and the collectivity during the emergence of a modern, mass, urban, industrial society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Grossman has shown, Cret's architecture exhibits these tensions.

It likewise exposes, and even monumentalizes, the tensions inherent in any attempt to harmonize architecture and engineering into a greater unity.

120 Ibid., 156.

121 David P. Billington, The Tower and the Bridge: The New Art of Structural

Engineering (NewYork, 1983), 4. 122 Cret, "Introduction," to Watson, n.p. 123 Cret quoted the first sentence of the "Avant-Propos" of Paul Sijourn6,

Les Grandes Voi2tes (Bourges, 1913), 1: n.p. The original French reads: "On fait une vofite d'apras les vofites faites: c'est affaire d'exp~rience." Sejourni's study, an enormous six-volume treatise published from 1913 to 1916, includes an illustrated inventory of all large masonry and concrete bridges in the world, as well as extensive advice on all phases of bridge design and construction. For a short biography of Sejourn6, see Bernard Marrey, "Paul S~journ6," in L'Art de




l'ing&nieur: constructeur, entrepreneur, inventeur, ed. Antoine Picon (Paris, 1997),

450. 124 Cret let S6journ6 speak for him in an unpublished paper on his Calvert

Street Bridge (1931) in Washington, D.C., a collaboration with the engineering firm of Modjeski, Masters, and Case. See Paul Cret, "The Calvert Street

Bridge," unpublished paper, 1931, Paul P. Cret Collection, Special Collections

Library, University of Pennsylvania. 125 Embury, "Esthetics of Bridge Anchorages," 86; Ammann, "Planning and

Design of Bronx-Whitestone Bridge," CivilEngineering9 (April 1939): 217. 126 Embury, "Esthetics of Bridge Anchorages," 87. 127 See, for example "Stays and Brakes Check Oscillation of Whitestone

Bridge," EngineeringNews-Record 125 (5 December 1940): 750-752.

128James K. Finch, "Wind Failures of Suspension Bridges, or, Evolution and

Decay of the Stiffening Truss," Engineering News-Record 126 (13 March 1941): 404. Emphasis added. Finch may have had greater insights into this problem because, unlike most engineers, he had contemplated the implications of the

disciplinary schism. In 1936 he had asked: "Why should two professions which are the principal members of the same industry and have a more or less common history, fail to agree?... [T]wo professions, sisters under the skin, have developed with diametrically opposed methods, viewpoints, and ideals"

(Finch, "Engineering and Architecture: Should Not These Two Ancient Profes- sions Speak the Same Language?" Civil Engineering6 [June 1936]: 377).

129 "Forgotten History," Engineering News-Record 126 (13 March 1941): 390.

Emphasis added. 130I would like to thank Guy Nordenson for bringing this aspect of the

deflection theory to my attention. 131 Bragdon, "Towards a New Architecture," 246. 132 Cret, "The Architect as Collaborator," 97. 133 Cret, "Introduction," to Watson, n.p.

Illustration Credits

Figure 1. Delaware River Bridge Joint Commission of the States of Pennsylva- nia and New Jersey, Report of the Board of Engineers (Burlington, N.J., 1922), opp. 22

Figure 2. Le Corbusier ? copyright 1997 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Fondation Le Corbusier

Figures 3, 4, 6, 9, 14. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania Figure 5. o 1928 ArchitecturalForum, used with permission from BPI Communi- cations Inc.

Figures 7, 8. Delaware River BridgeJoint Commission of the States of Pennsylva- nia and NewJersey, Final Report of the Board ofEngineers to the DelawareRiverBridge Joint Commission of the States of Pennsylvania and New Jersey (Burlington, N.J., 1927), 87, plate XIII, section G-C Figure 10. Delaware River Bridge Joint Commission of the States of Pennsylva- nia and NewJersey, Final Report of the Board ofEngineers to the DelawareRiverBridge Joint Commission of the States of Pennsylvania and New Jersey (Burlington, N.J., 1921), 12

Figure 11. Delaware River Bridge Joint Commission of the States of Pennsylva- nia and New Jersey, Report of the Delaware River Bridge Joint Commission (n.p., 1923), 3

Figure 12. Architecture 72 (August 1935): 66

Figure 13. PencilPoints 19 (February 1938): 111

Figure 15. Engineering (London) 10(8July 1870):31

Figure 16. City of Philadelphia, Department of Records, City, Archives, RG 140, ArtJury: Art Commission, Submissions, 1911-1960

Figure 17. PencilPoints 19 (July 1938):408

Figure 18. Special Collections Division, University of Washington Libraries, Photo by F. B. Farquharson, negative # 2

Figure 19. Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, 5January 1922, 5




Documents

Staging the Tragedy of Time: Paul Cret and the Delaware ... · Staging the Tragedy of Time: Paul Cret and the Delaware River Bridge ... The cultivation of the mind through the knowledge