Tectonics

Author(s): Peter Collins

Source: Journal of Architectural Education (1947-1974) , Spring, 1960, Vol. 15, No. 1
(Spring, 1960), pp. 31-33
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of Collegiate Schools
of Architecture, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1424135

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Ever since the distinction between architects and engineers
fully asserted itself about a century ago, it has become cus-
tomary for architectural theorists to reflect upon the occur-
rence despondently. In the nineteenth century, the attitude
of the most enlightened theorists was simply to deny that
any real line of demarcation between these two branches of
the building profession existed. 'If architecture were only as
truthful and as living an art as engineering', wrote Fergusson,
'the distinction would entirely vanish.' The engineer, he as-
serted, would only be the architect who occupied himself
more especially with construction and the more utilitarian
class of works; the architect, properly so-called, would be
the artist who attended to the planning of buildings, and
their decoration when erected.
With the abandonment of ornament in the present
century, theorists have displayed a more equivocal attitude
than formerly, but the same yearning for a fusion between
the two professions is apparent. For example, Bruno Zevi,
one of our most thoughtful writers on modern architecture
and its antecedents, seems deliberately to interchange the
two terms when discussing structures he admires. Henri
Labrouste is described as an engineer, despite the fact that he
was trained exclusively at the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts
and at the French Academy in Rome. Robert Maillart, on
the other hand, is referred to as an architect, though he was
essentially a bridge designer, and was seldom concerned
with architecture except as a consultant. Even his biogra-
pher, Max Bill, remarks that 'the buildings Maillart de-
signed by himself, in contrast to his bridges, are not very
important externally, while they are basically the same in-
ternally !'
As the century advances, dissertations and seminars
to improve means of co-operation between the two pro-
fessions become more frequent. The reason for this is ob-
vious. Within the last ten years, the relationship between
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Peter Collins
Tectonics
McGill University
architecture and engineering has become increasingly more
difficult to adjust and harder to define, since not only is the
structural engineer now an indispensable consultant in any
building of importance, but with the total and universal
abandonment of ornament, originality of architectural de-
sign has come to depend almost entirely on structural virtu-
osity. Thus the engineer is now required not so much to
calculate the inner skeleton of a design (as was usually the
case at the beginning of the century) but to evolve with the
architect the very character of the composition itself.
In assuming this new relationship, the role of the en-
gineer has become disturbingly ambiguous. According to
the early theorists of the Modern Movement, the engineer
was the scientist whose duty it was to create the basic struc-
tural forms of building which the architect could then
adapt, proportion, and refine in accordance with the re-
quirements of the program. This was the approach ex-
pressed by Le Corbusier in Towards a New Architecture. But
architects have become so impatient to take the lead, that
there are few, even among students, who do not think it a
point of honor to design completely original structural sys-
tems in their architectural projects, especially in competi-
tions. The architect's constant plea for greater collaboration
and co-operation between architects and engineers is thus
primarily a slightly petulant demand that the engineers shall
shake themselves free from yesterday's outmoded structural
systems, and calculate wholeheartedly the novel forms
sketched out for them, even though these at first appear un-
stable (as indeed they are often, paradoxically enough, in-
tended to appear).
This attitude is largely instilled in architects by the
system of architectural education established in the heroic
period of the Contemporary Revolution, whereby every
student is made to feel that it is incumbent on him to pro-
duce prodigy architecture worthy to figure in his eventual
3I
32 The Journal of Architectural Education
Oeuvres Conmpletes. But if future architects are to be spared
the frustration of seeing their most imaginative projects and
daring details apparently mutilated by uncomprehending
or unimaginative engineers, two modifications are needed
in our educational system. The first is the establishment of a
rule in undergraduate schools of architecture, whereby no
project shall be considered acceptable unless the structural
system indicated has actually been proved in practice. The
second is the division of structural engineering curricula
into two distinct disciplines-'long span' and 'short span';
the latter being co-ordinated, if not actually combined,
with the courses given in the architectural schools.
Far from encouraging students to believe in the un-
limited potentialities of their own structural virtuosity,
teachers of architecture should now consider it their duty,
however reactionary it may make them appear, to instil the
unpalatable truth that true creative genius in the realm of
engineering is as rare as in the realm of architecture, and can
only be acquired after long familiarity with the actual proc-
esses of building construction, and after personal experience
of responsibility in executing other people's designs.
As regards the distinction between 'long span' and
'short span' engineering, it seems to me that much of the
confusion and frustration generated between the two pro-
fessions has been due to a lack of understanding as to how
they came to be separated in the first place. The separation
had nothing to do with the introduction of new structural
materials, such as metal, or with the Ruskinian distinction
between construction and ornament. It originated quite
simply when the spans of bridges increased beyond the ex-
tent to which rule-of-thumb masonry techniques were ade-
quate to design them, and when the temporary trusses on
which they were built had to be calculated accurately in
order to support the enormously increased weight of stone.
Up to the middle of the eighteenth century, when
the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees (the French School of Bridges
and Roads) was founded, the chief engineers had been ap-
pointed from among the leading architects of the kingdom
-de la Guepiere, Jacques V. Gabriel, and Boffrand. But
with the appointment ofRodolphe Perronet in 1754 (a man
trained initially as an architect, but engaged from the age of
twenty-eight as an engineer in the Ponts et Chaussees), the
whole character of civil engineering began to change. It
was he who saw the need to make mathematics the basic
academic discipline. In his greatest bridge, the Pont de
Neuilly, he created a revolution in bridge design by calcu-
lating the piers mathematically instead of designing them
simply as a fifth of the span. Bridge building became in fact
an art in itself, no longer to be dealt with casually in archi-
tectural treatises, as it had been by Vitruvius and Palladio,
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but an entirely new discipline in which composition and
profile were determined less by esthetic than by mathemati-
cal criteria, and where the processes of construction, such as
the dismantling of formwork, became overriding factors in
the elaboration of the design itself.
Nevertheless architectural theorists still talk about
civil engineering and civil architecture in the same breath,
as if the two were really one, though unhappily divided like
a country engaged in civil war. Writers dfscuss parabolic
airship hangars and parabolic dwellings as if the principles
of design governing the two were fundamentally identical.
Yet it must surely be apparent that there is an unbridgeable
difference between the engineer's esthetic and the architect's
esthetic. This is not, as Le Corbusier contended in his earliest
writings, to be understood simply as a difference in the de-
gree of artistic competence, whereby the engineer's forms
are purely rational and the architect's packed with plastic
emotional power. It is purely a matter of scale, and nothing
else.
The consultant whom architects call in as a structural
engineer is, or should be, regarded simply as an architect
who specializes in one branch of architecture, just as some
architects are more gifted at detailing, site-organization, or
specification-writing than at planning and compositional
design. He is not acting as an engineer at all in the oldest and
truest sense of the word. This new type of structural de-
signer first emerged when steel and reinforced concrete
frame construction were introduced at the end of the last
century, but at that time only bridge builders, such as W.
le B. Jenney, were competent to design them. Now that
this art has finally reached full stature (in that applied orna-
ment has been abandoned, and architecture can once more
become nothing but structure) it only remains for our edu-
cational system to recognize the fact.
I would suggest that one way to do this would be
first to give the new science an identity, and this could per-
haps be achieved by ternling it 'Tectonics'. This is not to
say that all I am advocating is merely a change of name, but
simply that the establishment of terminological identity is
the first step towards establishing any new branch of knowl-
edge. 'Morphology' and 'Sociology' were both studied
long before the terms were invented, but it was only after-
wards that they flourished. Once it is recognized by aca-
demic authorities that the establishment of a separate chair
of tectonics is as essential today as, say, the establishment of
a separate chair of control engineering, the integration of
architectural design disciplines will be well on its way to
complete realization.
hi the meantime, let us no longer think to honor the
great engineers of our generation by patronizingly bestow-
 Tectonics 33

ing on them the title 'architect'. The greatest works of
Freyssinet, Maillart, Nervi, and even Candela (if we ex-
clude those buildings in which they acted only as consul-
tants) are not architecture but essentially long-span struc-
tures: bridges, aircraft hangars, stadia, and vast assembly
halls. Though their beauty depends as much on intuitive
imaginative genius as that of any temple or palace, it is
beauty of a different order, deriving its emotive power from
a precision of calculation and an audacity of execution
which, from the nature of materials, small span structures in
steel and concrete can never logically possess. Our present
task is not to parody great feats of engineering in works of
human scale, but to raise tectonics to the dignity it merits;
no longer a reluctant handmaiden serving the imperious
whims of abstract painters and sculptors, but an honored
partner in the whole noble process of building rationa
structures for the habitation of man.

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