If proof was needed of the international character of the Engineering History and Heritage journal, one only has to note the contributions in this issue from Germany, Denmark, the USA, Iran and New Zealand to be convinced. And there are many more excellent papers in the pipeline that should appeal to the worldwide readership of future issues of the journal.
One of the youngest of the professional engineering institutions, the Institution of Professional Engineers, New Zealand, formed in 1914 nearly a century after the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), runs an active programme for the identification and promotion of New Zealand's engineering heritage. The briefing by Rob Aspden (2011) describes the history of the organisation and how interest in engineering heritage in New Zealand was nurtured and expanded to the point where there is now significant on-line access to engineering heritage information at www.ipenz.org.nz/heritage.
From the 1850s, the British market for engineering consultancy was dominated by a network of professionals based in central London and within easy reach of the ICE and allied professional organisations. The ICE provided a forum for the presentation and discussion of technical papers and had (and still has) a world-class library devoted to civil engineering. Parliament and all the relevant ministries were nearby. The Westminster consulting engineers were a select group whose network was held together by strong ties based on long-standing business partnerships, apprenticeship systems, family relations and a shared professional identity (Clifton and Porter, 1988). In his paper, Dr Casper Andersen, Carlsberg Foundation Scholar at the University of Aarhus, analyses the colonial connections and networks of British consulting engineers and also examines the close and at times strained connections that existed between London's consulting engineers and British engineers stationed overseas in colonial public works departments (Andersen, 2011).
In the May 2011 issue of the journal, Eberhard Pelke (2011a) discussed the construction of pre-stressed concrete bridges in Germany in the years leading up to World War II and the reasons that Germany took such a lead in the technology. He now continues the story post war, when the urgent need to replace the ruined infrastructure, in particular road and rail bridges, presented an ideal opportunity for Fritz Leonhardt (1909–1999) and others to develop further their methods of pre-stressing and construction techniques (Pelke, 2011b). In the south of the country, engineers working with pre-stressed concrete encountered clients and contractors who were willing to take risks, were faced with steel, staff and funding shortages, but who had the job of providing a functioning infrastructure. Like part 1 of the paper, part 2 is well illustrated and presents a detailed look at developments up to 1965. Leonhardt is noted for his many bridge designs, but also for his marvellous bi-lingual book on bridges, published by the Architectural Press, London in 1982 (Leonhardt, 1982). In it he remarked that ‘bridge building can grow into a passion that never loses its freshness and stimulus throughout a man's life'.
Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) was a Catalan architect and the best-known representative of Catalan Modernism. In his paper, with the intriguing title of ‘Gaudi’s reluctant attitude to the inverted catenary', Jos Tomlow (2011) writes that both Gaudi's thinking and his architectural works provoke question marks amongst modern structural engineers, and give rise to considerable scepticism.
Gaudí's works are marked by a highly individual style, the vast majority of them being situated in the Catalan capital of Barcelona, including his magnum opus, the Sagrada Família, one of the most visited monuments in Spain. Rarely did Gaudí draw detailed plans of his works and instead preferred to create them as three-dimensional scale models, moulding all details as he was conceiving them in his mind. One technique Gaudí used was to hang little bags of lead shot from chains hanging from a floor plan of the structure on the ceiling. Gravity pulled the bags downwards, giving even weight distribution and stretching the chains to form a model structure, thus showing him the shapes and angles his pillars would need to be. A mirror placed under the model enabled Gaudí to observe a model of the structure as it might appear in reality. A replica of his model for the crypt of his Colònia Güell church is in the museum under the Sagrada Família. These models allowed Gaudí to perform designs only computers can do today and placed him many years ahead of the designers of the time. The hanging model as a tool of optimisation is based on the principle of the inverted catenary and Gaudi was the first known architect to build a three-dimensional hanging model.
In his paper, Professor Tomlow has tried to separate unproven speculative opinions and long-persisting legends from those parts of Gaudi's genius that we may understand as rational.
Much has been written concerning the arch, especially its use in masonry bridges, the arch form being used from early times, but I was struck by the similarities between the herringbone arch form prevalent in Iran, as described in their paper by Makarchian and Khodaverdian (2011), with the pointed arches used in the Cistercian monasteries in Ireland constructed during the medieval period. Similar arches are also to be found in some of the early French bridges. The arches, composed of radially-laid stones/tiles/bricks, all in compression, and finished off with a triangular ‘keystone’, were generally easy to set out, but the architects and masons in Iran developed a method of arch construction peculiar to the region. The study of the various types of mortar used in early masonry structures has become essential for their understanding and conservation – the particular type of mortar used in Iran is fully described by the authors in their paper in which they assess the importance of a number of historic bridges in Hamedan province.
The final paper in this issue introduces a completely different subject. The Milk River Irrigation Project in Montana in the United States of America is a typical example of how engineers had to overcome significant natural and political barriers in their desire to change ‘where water was (to) where they wanted it to be’. In this case they had to overcome an international boundary and a continental divide to convey water from the St Mary River into the Milk River drainage basin, where there were thousands of acres of semi-arid lands available for irrigation. Professor Quivik (2011) tells the story of this project from its inception through to its often difficult construction in barely settled terrain, portions of which lay in native Indian territory.
