Robert Maillart and the Art of Reinforced Concrete by David P. Billington

Abstract

technology and culture Book Reviews 621 designed and built the dam and why it cracked or how the matter was resolved. Other issues given insufficient attention are the great battle be­ tween the privately owned power companies and those advocating public power and the court’s finding of negligence on the part of the LCRA in its river operations preceding the great flood of 1938. The reader would also wish for more even biographical treatments of the main characters: while Lyndon Johnson is handled well, others, like Congressman James Buchanan, are described superficially. Additionally troubling are errors of fact concerning the Bureau of Reclamation’s historic role. Adams notes, “In the 1920s [USBR] reclamation projects involved simple irrigation systems consisting of diversion dams and canals. These early structures usually involved no special large-scale engineering requirements other than those pecu­ liar to each site. In like fashion, early storage projects and dams were usually earthen constructions requiring basic engineering procedures and techniques” (p. 26). He writes, too, that the bureau’s initial role under the Reclamation Act of 1902 proved effective “only in smallscale irrigation projects” (p. 25) and that it was not until Roosevelt’s New Deal that the federal government “reversed its role” and took the lead in water development projects in the West. Adams fails to consider the very successful Salt River Project and its Roosevelt Dam, the largest masonry arch dam in the United States until 1938, or the Pathfinder Dam on Nebraska’s North Platte project, a masonry arch structure 218 feet high. Both were designed and constructed by the bureau more than twenty years before construction began on the LCRA, to serve, in Salt River’s case, more than 250,000 acres of land. Other dams were earthen in construction but were not by any means simple in design. Adams’s concluding chapter is very well done, and one wishes he had used the same organizing and analytical scheme throughout the book. As it is, he makes several compelling statements about the sig­ nificance of the LCRA, but we are never sure how he got there. Karen L. Smith Dr. Smith is manager of Information Systems at the Salt River Project, Phoenix, Arizona. She has published The MagnificentExperiment: Building the Salt RiverReclamation Project, 1890—1917 (University of Arizona Press, 1986) and is presently writing a history of water policy in central Arizona from 1900 to 1980. Robert Maillart and the Art ofReinforced Concrete. By David P. Billington. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. Pp. xvi+151; illustrations, notes, glossary, index. $60.00. More than a decade ago David Billington was awarded SHOT’s Dexter Prize for Robert Maillart’s Bridges: The Art of Engineering. In a 622 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE relatively slim volume that was as elegant as the Swiss engineer’s bridges, Billington explored the interaction of aesthetic and technical considerations in Maillart’s structural designs of reinforced concrete while at the same time paying attention to the political and economic constraints that shaped them. In another highly regarded volume, The Tower and the Bridge: The New Art of Structural Engineering, he examined these same issues within the larger history of modern structural engineering. In that book Billington also discussed Mail­ lart’s influence on engineering and architectural design. The volume under review here is largely a condensation of Billington’s first book on Maillart with additional material from The Tower and the Bridge. Copublished by MIT Press and the Architec­ tural History Foundation, this is a coffee-table book intended for a popular audience and, appropriately, it contains German as well as English text. The form of this book is important to its major contribution. Like other coffee-table books, it is filled with beautiful modern color photographs (produced under Billington’s direction) that help to remind us that these structures continue to perform their original function while also providing aesthetic pleasure. Furthermore, these photographs illustrate an important aspect of structural design—the relationship between built and natural environments—in different ways from the historic black-and-white photographs used in the earlier volumes (and in a few places in this one). Perhaps because they draw more attention to the physical...