Structural engineers are a bit like surgeons. Their sometimes extraordinarily complex decisions are often all that stands between life and death. Like surgeons, they tend to be an egotistical lot, full of a sense of themselves as the ones who hold this world together. And, of course, they have a point. The calculations and instincts of the structural engineer, like those of the surgeon, do often measure the distance between well-being and disaster. “Bridges, like health,” writes the engineer Henry Petroski, “are most appreciated when they begin to deteriorate and fail.” Unlike doctors, however, builders tend not to arouse the admiration of society as a whole. Engineers of all kinds tend to be lumped into the pocket-protector class, and are never the subjects of popular fiction, as surgeons often are. Can one imagine a TV show like “ E.R.” centering on the lives and loves of engineers? Actually, I bet Henry Petroski can.

Every few years, along comes a particularly sensitive engineer who seeks to promote his profession to the cultural elite. In the 1980s we had Samuel Florman, one of whose tomes was entitled The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. In the 1990s, we have Henry Petroski, professor of civil engineering at Duke University, author of To Engineer Is Human, and more than a tad unlike most of the other Duke professors of our recent acquaintance. Petroski’s mission seems to be twofold. First, he wishes, as in his books The Pencil and The Evolution of Useful Things, to imbue us with the wonder of the mundane, rather as though he were a late-twentieth-century Gerard Manley Hopkins. Second, he wishes, via the good graces of Alfred A. Knopf and The New York Times Book Review, to see to it that engineers are represented alongside Oliver Sacks and Stephen Jay Gould on the end tables of Gwathmeier houses in the eastern end of Long Island. And what better means has the chattering engineer to affect educated sensibilities than to mention art every three or four hundred words?

Professor Petroski’s newest book is Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America. It is a marvelous read, filled both with strong narrative drama and fascinating and informative aperçus. It is, indeed, well-nigh unassailable as a responsible and engaging general survey of the history of American bridge building. Here are the great bridge builders whose names should be more familiar to the generally educated public: Othmar Hermann Ammann, engineer of New York’s George Washington, Bronx-Whitestone, and Verrazano-Narrows bridges, and of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, considered by many the visually most exhilarating bridge in America; Gustav Lindenthal, engineer of the Manhattan, Queensboro, and Hell Gate bridges; David Steinman, engineer of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and of the Mackinac Bridge; and James Buchanan Eads, an American Telford who spanned the Mississippi exactly two hundred years after Father Marquette first laid eyes on the mighty river.

That said, the thoughtful reader is bound to find that this book poses many more questions than it is within the purview of its author to attempt to answer, and that indeed the author himself in the very course of his effort to relate the romance of engineering seems wholly unprepared for some of the thickets into which he has strayed. I speak, of course, of Petroski’s conflation of art and engineering, and, more broadly, of this notion that the honorific “art” is the ultimate token of esteem in our disintegrating culture. Petroski writes:  

The greatest bridges that engineers have built are clearly the ones that unite and achieve both structural and aesthetic goals, and often with striking strength and economy in their context. Above all, however, engineers know that, first and foremost, their bridges must stand into the future against weight and wind and want. The most beautiful bridge, when neglected in structural design and maintenance, can become, fallen, the most ugly pile of concrete and steel. That is not bridge building.

Now, Petroski is a sane and deliberative man, and the passage just quoted may seem the statement of such a man. But it is freighted with presumptions. And needless to say these presumptions have nothing to do with engineering per se. They have rather to do with aesthetics.

This issue of aesthetics in relation to things like bridge building would lose all relevance were it not for our now customary predisposition to apply the sobriquet “art” to any and all of the manifestations of man’s nominally expressive nature, whether they be the daubs of deaf children or the massive, concretized equations of engineers. Let me point out that I believe the appellation “artistic” in the writings of Henry Petroski to be an afterthought—an appliquéd embellishment of his obviously more heartfelt perorations on the intricacies of applied science. Still, the appellation dutifully appears and reappears throughout the discussion of bridge building, as though to leave art unmentioned would sully the seriousness of the project.

An important strand of modernist design theory, from its Victorian roots onward, attempted to blur the distinction between art and engineering. I believe—though this may not be the place to discuss it—that this particular conflation opened the floodgates to our present-day widespread insistence that all manner of political screed or perceptual experiment (however valid it may be in the strict context of its delimited purlieu) is somehow to be regarded, by the media, the universities, and government, as a work of art. Petroski self-consciously models his book to some extent on the wonderful Lives of the Engineers by the English historian of technology Samuel Smiles. Smiles’s five-volume work was published by John Murray in 1904, and though strictly speaking it is of the Edwardian era, it nonetheless ranks as one of the monuments of Victorian consciousness. Now, Smiles could refer to the “art” of engineering, but when he did so he meant something a bit different from what we would mean today. “Art,” for Smiles, bore a strictly Aristotelian resonance, and as such was distinct from les beaux arts. These two senses of art would never, in a consciousness such as that of Samuel Smiles, be taken to refer to the same thing. For contrast, listen to Le Corbusier on the subject of the George Washington Bridge: “When your car moves up the ramp the two towers rise so high that it brings you happiness; their structure is so pure, so resolute, so regular that here, finally, steel architecture seems to laugh.” How Ruskin would have cringed at that sentence! Henry Petroski, though, does not cringe; and when he speaks of the art of bridge building he does so in such a way as to relegate aesthetics to a branch of endeavor which in its organized and formalized tenets and traditions is bound to appear quite meager beside science or engineering. And this is of course nonsense.

It is also sad, for Petroski is an honorable and responsible scholar whose forced forays in aesthetic delectation exhibit an amateurishness he would clearly disdain were the situation reversed, and the aesthetician presumed to comment upon an engineering science of which he had no knowledge.

For Petroski, the auteur of a bridge is its engineer, not its architect. It is, as he explains, often the case that a bridge’s architect does not conceive the form of a bridge, but rather is brought in after the basic design has been done, and is charged with embellishing it or fussing it up. Sometimes the engineer takes it upon himself to do any residual fussing, as is famously the case with the Roeblings’ Brooklyn Bridge with its spidery cables suspended from massive Gothic arches. The Gothic style is, of course, perfectly apposite in its use by the Roeblings, and indeed the Brooklyn Bridge is one of the most beguiling artifacts in America. Yet it can hardly be said, for example, to fit in with the Gothic Revival as propounded by such aesthetically ultra-sophisticated figures as Pugin, Viollet-le-Duc, and Ruskin. The aesthetic admiration of the Brooklyn Bridge, indeed of most modern bridges, is an admiration based not on what inheres in the work so much as on what is projected upon it. Our aesthetic admiration of the works of engineering, indeed, is not essentially different from our “aesthetic” experience of the “works” of nature. It is an ex post facto aestheticization. This is a defining issue of the modern consciousness, and is deeply rooted in Kant’s and Schiller’s categorical distinctions among the varieties of perceptual experience.

And because aesthetic appreciation of works of engineering is of this ex post facto variety, it is why works of engineering and technology have long been held up as the proudest achievements of American culture. They are, to use Philip Rahv’s famous (and still useful) distinction, monuments of our “Redskin” culture, in contrast to the “Paleface” norms of European high culture. Or, in Kantian terms, it may be said that the “sublimity” of nature has been projected upon the works of men, in contrast to the “beauty” of classical tradition. It therefore comes as no surprise when a critic like George Steiner, in his notorious and profoundly silly screed “The Archives of Eden,” posits that the only real contributions America has made to Western culture are in the field of engineering.

It is also not surprising, though it is dismaying, that the only beauty which seems to move Henry Petroski when he views our nation’s glorious bridges is the beauty of pure engineering form. How else to explain that he can expend twenty-six pages on the Manhattan Bridge yet fail even once to mention the great New York architects John Carrere and Thomas Hastings? Or to comment upon the vogue of Viollet-le-Duc which so manifestly influenced the design of that magnificent bridge? Petroski does not tell us that the considerable aesthetic frisson of the Queensboro Bridge owes as much to its gifted architect, Henry Hornbostel, as to its engineer, Lindenthal. And we are not sufficiently informed that the Golden Gate Bridge—the equal of the Chrysler Building as an icon of the interwar years in America—is, in its appeal to those who view and use it, as much the work of its gifted architect, Irving Morrow, as of its engineer, Ammann. The point is, where our bridges do thrill as pure works of engineering, then this should be stated; and where our bridges thrill with their architectural qualities, this should be stated. For we are a nation of both Redskins and Palefaces, and at this late date it simply does not do to suggest otherwise.