A Work of engineering and technology are sometimes viewed as having nothing to do with art and humanity. Think of the connotation of assembly lines, robots and computers. The positive values associated with these creation can be overwhelmed by the negative associations of repetitive, stressful work and threatened jobs. Critics of technology protest against what they see as the same time, megastructures such as the Brooklyn and Golden Gate Bridges in the US are hailed as majestic human achievements, as well as great engineering monuments that have come to embody the spirit of their respective cities. The relationship between art and engineering has seldom been easy or consistent.
B Arguably, the assembly line process associated with Henry Ford made workers tools of the system. The human worker may have appeared to be only a cog in the wheel of industry, yet photographers such as Lewis Hine revealed the beauty of man in composition in his study of a worker using a wrench to turn a bolt. Hine focused on the individuals engaged in the work. In the period around World War I, he visited New York and was given the opportunity to record the construction of the famous Empire State Building, the tallest building of its time. This resulted in a series of striking photographs which have become familiar images of daring. Hine put his own life at risk to photograph workers suspended on cables hundreds of feet in the air, or sitting on a high girder eating lunch.
C When Ford’s enormous River Rouge plant opened in 1927, the painter-photographer Charles Sheeler was chosen to photograph it. The world’s largest car plant captured the imagination of Sheeler, who described it as ‘the most thrilling subject he had ever had to work with.’
D Long before Hine and Sheeler, other photographers and painters had seen the art and humanity in works of engineering and technology. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the Coalbrookdale Museum of Iron, at Ironbridge in Shropshire in the UK. In the late 18th century, Abraham Darby cast the large iron ribs that formed the world’s first iron bridge, a dramatic departure from the classic stone and timber bridges that dotted the countryside and had been captured in numerous landscape paintings. This structure still spans the River Severn, and the Coalbrookdale Museum is crowded with its portraits, showing the iron structure not as a blight on the landscape, but as its focal point. This is how Michael Rooker shows the iron bridge in his late 18th-century painting, in which the surrounding area radiates out from the bridge and pales behind it. Countless other contemporary representations of the bridge hang in the nearby museum.
E In the 19th century, the railways were another feat of engineering which captured the imagination of painters, and the steam engine in the distance of a landscape became as much a part of it as the herd of cows in the foreground. The Impressionist Claude Monet painted railway stations - such as the Gare St-Lazare in Paris - as well as flower and gardens. By the 20th century, engineering, technology and industry were very well established as subjects for artists.
F American-born artist Joseph Pennell portrayed buildings under construction and shrouded in scaffolding, and recorded scenes of industry during World War I. He is perhaps best known for his prints of the Panama Canal as it neared completion and of the partially completed Hell Gate and Delaware River Bridges. Pennell has often been quoted as saying, ‘Great engineering is great art’, a sentiment that he expressed repeatedly. He wrote of his contemporaries: ‘I understand nothing of engineering, but I know that engineers are the greatest architects and the most pictorial builders since the (ancient) Greeks.’ Pennell called the sensation that he felt when he looked at a great construction project ‘the Wonder of Work.’ He saw engineering as a process memorialized in every completed dam, skyscraper, bridge or other great engineering feat.
G Today, one of the most innovative and influential engineers is Santiago Calatrava, who also trained as an architect. His bridges and other structures provide public spaces on a human scale, and stand as pieces of sculpture in their own right. Increasingly, commissioners of bridges in the US are looking to such individuals, to teams of engineers and architects who work with artists. The growing awareness of the intangible added value of art is sure to give us more masterpieces like the Brooklyn Bridge. They in turn will continue to be noble monuments to civilization, and will be welcome subjects for artists of all kinds.