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NOTES FROM THE FIELD
GOINGS-ON ABOUT TOWN
Technological news from around New York City
BY FREDERIC D. SCHWARZ
THE BRONX-WHITESTONE Bridge has long been New York City’s least charismatic major span. One reason is that it connects two resolutely untrendy boroughs, the Bronx and Queens. But another reason is the way it has repeatedly been strapped in and buckled up for safety through the years. Underneath it all lies a beautiful bridge, but the effect has been like dressing Heidi Klum in a snorkel coat and galoshes. Now, however, the bridge is being stripped down to something resembling its original designer attire.
The Bronx-Whitestone opened in 1939, at the height of the fashion for slender, elegant suspension spans. That fashion came to an abrupt end the following year, when the Tacoma Narrows Bridge shook apart in a heavy wind. In response, the Bronx-Whitestone was retrofitted with diagonal stays between its towers and deck. In 1946, after these proved inadequate, the roadway was widened and clunky steel trusses were added on each side. And in 1988 a 94-ton tuned mass damper was installed to counteract the continuing problem of swaying in strong winds.
The alterations not only destroyed the bridge’s clean lines but also added lots of weight, increasing the strain on the suspension cables. Now advances in materials science are making it possible to solve both problems. The stays and trusses have been replaced with wind-deflecting fairings made of fiber-reinforced polymer, which are smaller and much lighter. The roadbed, formerly made of heavy crossbeams embedded in a thick layer of concrete, will be replaced with a lighter steel plate. And a thin coating of epoxy will replace several inches of asphalt on the road surface.
This spring the city celebrated the sixty-fifth anniversary of the bridge’s opening. The new fairings were all in place, allowing a much better view for motorists making the crossing. The other projects continue, and by 2006, if all goes well, the renovations will be complete and the bridge will be stronger and lovelier than it has been for decades. Heidi Klum should be lucky enough to look this good at age 65.
In Manhattan, meanwhile, the Skyscraper Museum has finally found a permanent home after nearly a decade spent living out of a suitcase in a series of temporary lodgings. The museum is located on the ground floor of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Battery Park City, on the edge of the skyscraper-dense financial district. It’s a compact collection, displayed in a single room, though the mirrored floors and ceilings create the impression of great height. A visitor will find construction photographs, working documents, beautifully illustrated old books, and exhibits on towers from the Sears Building to Shanghai’s Jin Mao Building, the tallest in Asia.
Perhaps most fascinating is the opening display, in which prominent architects give their definitions of the word skyscraper. It’s not clear what this says about national characters, but Renzo Piano, of Italy, exuberantly writes, “THE ONLY WAY TO GO UP TO BREATH FRESH AIR IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CITY!,” while Lord Foster of Britain is far more restrained (”a building or structure which is tall relative to its time and context”) and an assortment of Americans are long-winded and poetic in varying degrees. For information on the Skyscraper Museum, see www.skyscraper.org.
And while soaring bridges and a spiky skyline are often used as graphic shorthand for New York, the true essence of the city lies underground, in its 722 track miles of subways. The city’s subway system will celebrate its centennial this October, and one of the better short books being published to mark the occasion is Subways: The Tracks That Built New York City, by Lorraine B. Diehl (Clarkson Potter, 128 pages, $18.00). With memorabilia such as sheet music and Miss Subways posters as well as old maps, photographs of long-closed stations, and chapters on New York’s now-vanished trolleys and elevated trains, the book provides a fine, concise guide to how the subways were conceived and built and how they came to symbolize and typify life in America’s biggest city.
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PUTTING THINGS TOGETHER
A pair of distinguished scholars publish new collections
The history of technology, once the province of buffs and collectors, has become academicized to the point where its practitioners may bear as many labels as a steamer trunk: externalist, social constructivist, feminist, Marxist, and so on. The best historians combine many approaches, and two of the most revered workers in the field have demonstrated their talents in new books: Human-Built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture, by Thomas P. Hughes (University of Chicago Press, 203 pages, $22.50), and Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering, by Henry Petroski (Knopf, 288 pages, $25.00).
The two men’s varying backgrounds—Hughes is a historian who writes about engineering, while Petroski is an engineer who writes about history—show through even in their tables of contents. Hughes groups his chapters together under headings like “Technology and the Second Creation” and “Creating an Ecotechnological Environment,” and his list of illustrations ranges from masterpieces of Renaissance and Romantic painting to photographs of modernist skyscrapers. Petroski’s table of contents has just two sections, “Bridges” plus “And Other Things,” and his illustrations are mostly photographs, renderings, and diagrams of the works under discussion.
Hughes, the longtime guiding spirit of the history of technology at Penn (and now a professor emeritus), covers such themes as artists’ reactions to technology, the relations between natural and human-built environments, and the benefits and perils of constructing ever more complicated systems. His sources range from the “public intellectual” Lewis Mumford to the former House speaker Newt Gingrich and the saxophonist Lester Young. Along the way he discusses Germany’s Bauhaus and Neue Sachlichkeit movements, the scholastics of me- dieval France, and George Gilder’s celebration of the “outsiders, nerds, science wonks, and upwardly mobile young engineers” who are driving the information revolution.
Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke, writes a column for American Scientist, from which the chapters in this book have been collected. Most examine a specific project, usually a major structure, such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or China’s Three Gorges Dam. For each one, Petroski examines how it was designed and (if completed) built, what makes it noteworthy, and how it succeeded—or, in cases like the tragic Texas A&M bonfire of 1999, how it failed. Unlike his previous book, Small Things Considered (2003), which was rambling, personal, and thematic, Pushing the Limits contains little overarching analysis. Instead, the chapters stand on their own, each one teaching a lesson about the complicated juggling act of science, aesthetics, politics, sociology, economics, and many other factors that lies behind every major engineering project.
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ALL FALL DOWN
A Web site shows what’s being demolished around the world
After seeing the first Charlie’s Angels movie, a friend of ours gave the following capsule review: “They should have had fewer fights and blown more stuff up.” Readers with similar tastes will love implosionworld.com, a Web site that covers the demolition industry with news articles, reminiscences, and a profusion of video and still photographs of projects past and present from around the world (most of which, strictly speaking, are not really implosions, as the site concedes).
Visitors will find a section on records (largest, tallest, longest, most structures at once) as well as step-by-step reports of jobs like the demolition of Space Launch Complex 41 at the Kennedy Space Center. Some items have an element of wistfulness, like the taking down of an 1886 bridge in Kansas City or of other similarly historic structures (…Ben Franklin Worked Here!” says one jaunty account). Others have a mildly goofy tone, like the spindly Canadian radio tower that had to be knocked down after it was accidentally hit by an airplane. Yet, as can be seen from the ingenious planning that was needed to make a Welsh smokestack hemmed in by buildings fall nearly vertically, when it comes to demolition, the least visually impressive projects can often be the toughest.
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