World Architecture
World Architecture is a art or practice of designing and constructing buildings.
71. Garden city idea
The garden city idea was conceived in late-nineteenth-century Britain by London-born stenographer and inventor Ebenezer Howard 1850 1928. A garden city movement emerged, inspired by his seminal text Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform 1898, revised as Garden Cities of Tomorrow 1902, and by the example of on-the-ground models. The movement supported Howards objectives of improved residential environments and social opportunity. It made an enduring contribution to international planning thought by fostering the growth of planned residential communities and shaping ideas about the form and size of cities and towns.
The process of industrialization placed immense pressure on the physical resources of cities while at the same time depleting the agrarian workforce. Manufacturing processes and products took precedence over workers needs. Employees toiled long hours and lived in overcrowded, often degraded, accommodations close to their workplace. Parks and gardensgreen spaceswere rare, so there was little escape from industrial din and pollution. Social communication waned crime and immorality increased.
For much of the nineteenth century, the social condition and the issue of land reform occupied reformers, economists, and intellectuals in Britain and elsewhere. In an earnest attempt to find a way forward, societies, organizations, and ameliorative action groups were formed meetings and debates held publications released and theories and schemes advanced. Industrialists made practical efforts to improve employees working and living conditions. Well-known ventures in England included Lever Brothers soap factory at Port Sunlight, Liverpool 1888, and the Cadbury chocolate-making enterprise at Bournville, Birmingham 1879. Elsewhere there was Agneta Park near Delft, Holland, and industrial villages outside Noisiel, France, Essen, Germany, and in the United States at Lowell, Massachusetts.
Ebenezer Howard drew from a full larder of antecedents in devising his unique solution to urban disorder and misery. The answer wasGarden City, a town located in a rural setting but presenting all urban functions and services, thus combining the advantages of both town and country life. His scheme affirmed the role of the individual and the home in the urban landscape and the importance of satisfaction with home and place in the building of community. It would provide decent housing, ample opportunity for social interaction, and contact with nature to help keep mind and body healthy.
Garden City was envisioned as a preplanned, self-contained community of about 32,000 people. Its notional circular layout was enveloped and restricted by a greenbelt that offered clean air and space for agricultural and recreational pursuits. The city was divided into six equal segments or wards, separated by boulevards with a public park at the center and designated sites for municipal buildings, dwellings, churches, schools, and playgrounds. Shops were housed in a glass arcade encircling the central park. Facilities were within easy walking distance of all the houses. The industrial sector was placed at the perimeter and segregated from the residential to isolate noise and pollution. The garden citys self-governing community was to own and administer the land on which it was built revenue would be derived from ground rents and profits returned for the communal benefit. Howard envisaged that once the population reached its limit, a new garden city would be established nearby, eventually creating a cluster of satellite communitiesSocial Cityinterconnected by a rapid-transit system.
The Garden City Association 1899 and its successor, the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association 1909, supported Howards idea and promoted the construction of a model. The first was Letchworth Garden City, begun in 1904 in Hertfordshire, England, to a design by British architect-planner Raymond Unwin 1863 1940 and architect Barry Parker 1867 1941. A second garden city was built at Welwyn 1921. As its chief practitioner, Unwin played a vital role in disseminating the goals and principles of garden city planning.
Letchworth demonstrated that Howards holistic vision was difficult to implement, but it was lauded nonetheless for its exposition of the physical, environmental aspects of the idea rather than its economic, political, and social themes. It featured low-density development land-use zoning separate industrial and residential areas existing natural features variation in road width harmony in building scale, form, colors, and materials public open space private and public gardens and tree-lined streets. These components became popularly accepted as standard for planningon garden city lines and informed the design of residential offspring of the garden citygarden suburbs, towns, and villages. The most renowned of these, Unwins Hampstead Garden Suburb 1907, northwest of London, was the model for subsequent and numerous developments in England, continental Europe, the United States, Australasia, Asia, and Africa. In accord with garden city wisdom, each was adapted to suit local topographical, social, economic, and cultural conditions. However, the theory underpinning the form was the same.
At the metropolitan level, Howards argument for forward-looking, comprehensive planning and his vision of decentralized satellite cities surrounded by greenbelts offered a new planning approach and paradigm. It demonstrated how the city could be kept in touch with nature and introduced the concept of the master plan for metropolitan and regional development that was taken up as the century progressed. The garden city idea endured and came to the fore in the post World War II new towns program developed in England to accommodate population overflow in London Mark I towns and later in provincial cities like Liverpool Mark II. Stevenage 1946 in Hertfordshire was the first of the twenty-eight new towns established in Britain. New towns became an international phenomenon, and present-day planning movements such as New Urbanism acknowledge their debt to the garden city idea.
Letchworth, Welwyn, Hampstead Garden Suburb, and many of their international offspring survive. Some have been designated as heritage conservation areas. These now mature examples of planningon garden city lines continue to be attractive and desirable residential environments, proving the soundness of the philosophy that underpinned their plan.
72. Gateway Arch
St. Louis Missouri
The 630-foot-high 192-meter stainless-steel Gateway Arch rises from a wooded park within what became the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Park on the bank of the Mississippi in St. Louis, Missouri. Taller than the Washington Monument in the national capital and twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, the sleek and seamless Gateway Arch now known as the St. Louis Arch is a major achievement of twentieth-century architecture and structural engineering. A decision was taken in 1935 to establish a national monument in St. Louis, Missouri, to commemorate the nineteenth-century westward expansion that pursued Thomas Jeffersons dream of a continental United States. A large tract of riverfront land in the older part of the city was acquired and cleared, but the project was interrupted by the countrys involvement in World War II. With the return to peace, in 1947 1948 the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Association sponsored a design competition for an appropriate monument. The Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen was awarded first prize. Work on design development began in 1961, the year of the architects death, the project being managed by his firm, Eero Saarinen Associates. Fred Severud of the structural engineering practice Severud, Elstad, Krueger and Associates undertook a feasibility study about the buildability of the daring concept, and Dr. Hannskarl Bandel generated exacting calculations for the weighted catenary an inverted version of the curve of a suspended chain that forms the basis of the structure. Bruce Detmers and other architects converted the mathematics into working drawings. The main contractor was MacDonald Construction, and the steel was fabricated and erected by Pittsburgh-Des Moines Steel. The first concrete pour for the massive 60-foot-deep 18-meter foundations took place late in June 1962 and construction of the arch itself began eight months later. The span of the arch is the same as its height, and the composite structure consists of 142 welded, stainless-steel-faced sections of equilateral triangular cross sections. The length of their side at the base is 54 feet 16.5 meters, and the sections are 12 feet 3.6 meters high at the top, they have a side length of 17 feet 5.4 meters and are 8 feet 2.4 meters high. The legs have double walls with an inner skin of 0.375-inch-thick about 10-millimeter carbon steel and an outer skin of stainless steel, set 3 feet 90 centimeters apart at the 400-foot 120-meter level, the gap between the skins reduces to less than 8 inches 20 centimeters. For the first 300 feet the space between the walls is filled with concrete above that, to the crown of the arch, the structure is braced with steel stiffeners. It is clear that the engineering design is highly complicated, but all that can be seen from the outside is the sheer skin of polished stainless steel. The wall components were fabricated and bolted together in Pennsylvania and transported to St. Louis by rail. On-site, the triangular sections were welded by highly skilled tradesmen. In July 1998 their specialized work was recognized by the American Welding Societys Historical Welded Structure Award. The completed 50-ton 45.5-tonne double-walled sections were transported to the site on a specially designed railroad car and lifted into place. For the first 72 feet 21.6 meters, conventional cranes on the ground were used above that, purpose-made creeper cranes handled the sections. In effect, each leg of the arch was a vertical cantilever and therefore had no need of scaffolding. But when the 530-foot 162-meter level was reached, a steel stabilizing truss was lifted into place and fixed to brace the two legs while the remaining twenty-one sections and the centralkeystone were located. The arch was completed on 28 October 1965. As the creeper cranes moved back to the ground, their tracks were dismantled and bolt holes in the stainless-steel surface were made good. In 1967 1968 passenger trams were constructed in the hollow core of the arch, to carry visitorsthere were 4 million in 1999to a 140-person observation platform at the top, where tiny plate-glass windows give access to views up to 30 miles 50 kilometers eastward and westward. The total cost of the arch, including $2 million for the internal transportation system, was $13 million. The building received the American Institute of Architects 25 Year Award in 1990.
The 630-foot-high 192-meter stainless-steel Gateway Arch rises from a wooded park within what became the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Park on the bank of the Mississippi in St. Louis, Missouri. Taller than the Washington Monument in the national capital and twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, the sleek and seamless Gateway Arch now known as the St. Louis Arch is a major achievement of twentieth-century architecture and structural engineering. A decision was taken in 1935 to establish a national monument in St. Louis, Missouri, to commemorate the nineteenth-century westward expansion that pursued Thomas Jeffersons dream of a continental United States. A large tract of riverfront land in the older part of the city was acquired and cleared, but the project was interrupted by the countrys involvement in World War II. With the return to peace, in 1947 1948 the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Association sponsored a design competition for an appropriate monument. The Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen was awarded first prize. Work on design development began in 1961, the year of the architects death, the project being managed by his firm, Eero Saarinen Associates. Fred Severud of the structural engineering practice Severud, Elstad, Krueger and Associates undertook a feasibility study about the buildability of the daring concept, and Dr. Hannskarl Bandel generated exacting calculations for the weighted catenary an inverted version of the curve of a suspended chain that forms the basis of the structure. Bruce Detmers and other architects converted the mathematics into working drawings. The main contractor was MacDonald Construction, and the steel was fabricated and erected by Pittsburgh-Des Moines Steel. The first concrete pour for the massive 60-foot-deep 18-meter foundations took place late in June 1962 and construction of the arch itself began eight months later. The span of the arch is the same as its height, and the composite structure consists of 142 welded, stainless-steel-faced sections of equilateral triangular cross sections. The length of their side at the base is 54 feet 16.5 meters, and the sections are 12 feet 3.6 meters high at the top, they have a side length of 17 feet 5.4 meters and are 8 feet 2.4 meters high. The legs have double walls with an inner skin of 0.375-inch-thick about 10-millimeter carbon steel and an outer skin of stainless steel, set 3 feet 90 centimeters apart at the 400-foot 120-meter level, the gap between the skins reduces to less than 8 inches 20 centimeters. For the first 300 feet the space between the walls is filled with concrete above that, to the crown of the arch, the structure is braced with steel stiffeners. It is clear that the engineering design is highly complicated, but all that can be seen from the outside is the sheer skin of polished stainless steel. The wall components were fabricated and bolted together in Pennsylvania and transported to St. Louis by rail. On-site, the triangular sections were welded by highly skilled tradesmen. In July 1998 their specialized work was recognized by the American Welding Societys Historical Welded Structure Award. The completed 50-ton 45.5-tonne double-walled sections were transported to the site on a specially designed railroad car and lifted into place. For the first 72 feet 21.6 meters, conventional cranes on the ground were used above that, purpose-made creeper cranes handled the sections. In effect, each leg of the arch was a vertical cantilever and therefore had no need of scaffolding. But when the 530-foot 162-meter level was reached, a steel stabilizing truss was lifted into place and fixed to brace the two legs while the remaining twenty-one sections and the centralkeystone were located. The arch was completed on 28 October 1965. As the creeper cranes moved back to the ground, their tracks were dismantled and bolt holes in the stainless-steel surface were made good. In 1967 1968 passenger trams were constructed in the hollow core of the arch, to carry visitorsthere were 4 million in 1999to a 140-person observation platform at the top, where tiny plate-glass windows give access to views up to 30 miles 50 kilometers eastward and westward. The total cost of the arch, including $2 million for the internal transportation system, was $13 million. The building received the American Institute of Architects 25 Year Award in 1990.
73. Geodesic domes
A geodesic dome is a fractional part of a geodesic sphere, composed of a complex network of triangles. The archetypal geodesic sphere is made up of twenty curved triangles, each corresponding to one facet of the icosahedron, a twenty-faceted solid geometrical figure. The more complex the network that is, the smaller the triangles, the more closely the form approximates a true sphere. Using triangles of varying size, a sphere can be symmetrically divided by thirty-one great circles the largest that can be traced on the surface of a sphere. The triangles form a self-bracing framework that develops structural strength with a minimum amount of material. Thus, the geodesic dome combines the sphere the most efficient container of volume per unit of surface area with the polyhedron, which has the greatest strength per unit of mass. Developed in the first half of the twentieth century, it provided a completely new way of building light, transportable structures with efficient thermal and wind-resisting properties. For example, the aluminum-and-Teflon geodesicPillow Dome designed by Jay Baldwin is a permanent insulated structure that can resist 135-mph 216-kph winds and carry tons of snow it weighs only 0.5 pound per square foot 2.43 kilograms per square meter.
The worlds first geodesic dome was assembled on the roof of the Carl Zeiss Optical Works in Jena, Germany, in 1922. The 52-foot-diameter 16-meter structure, designed by Zeisss chief designer, Dr. Walter Bauersfeld, was necessary to test what he no doubt regarded as his more important invention, the planetarium projector. He built a complex skeleton of 3,480 light iron rods, accurate in length to 0.002 inch 0.05 millimeter to form a highly subdivided icosahedron. Twenty-five years later, the American genius Richard Buckminster Fuller 1895 1983 independently derived his geodesic dome patented 29 June 1954 from general principles, and he is generally credited with the invention of the form.
Fuller was deeply interested in the issues of shelter and housing, and by the end of World War II he had developed industrialized prototypes of the now-famous Dymaxion Houses, which he built for the Beech Aircraft Company in Wichita, Kansas. He then moved his attention to the construction of domes, because he believed that they reflectednatures coordinate system and therefore provided the optimally efficient way to enclose space. Through much of the 1940s he worked on small models of spheres or part-spheres made up of intersecting great circles, just as Bauersfeld had done. Fuller coined the namegeodesic dome because the arcs of great circles are known as geodesics Greek,earth dividing. In 1948 he seized the chance to take part in the summer school of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, taking with him the material needed to build a large-scale geodesic dome. Applying engineering strategy that he dubbedtensegrity a contraction oftensional integrityFuller loved to invent words, toohe devised a system that depended on a continuous tension element rather thandiscontinuous local compression members. He soon built a number of geodesic domes.
In 1953, Fuller built his first commercial dome, for the Ford Motor Company, and it was followed in 1954 by a 42-foot-diameter 12.8-meter cardboard shelter in his exhibit at the Milan Triennale in Italy it was awarded the Grand Prize. A few large-scale applications included the Union Tank Car dome 1958. In I960 Fuller proposed a 2-mile-wide 3.2-kilometer, 200-foot-high 60-meter, temperature-controlled geodesic dome to enclose part of New Yorks Manhattan Island, claiming that the savings of snow-removal costs would amortize the cost within 10 years. On a more practical level, his domes covered military projects including sensitive radar
installations radomes, emergency shelters, and mobile housing. They were and are also used for weather stations, industrial workshops, and greenhouses. One was even proposed for a cinema, in collaboration with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Fullers magnum opus is the former United States Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, Canada, designed with Shoji Sadao. The huge, lacy dome, framed with steel pipes enclosing 1,900 molded acrylic panels, has a diameter of 250 feet 76.5 meters and stands 200 feet 60 meters high,weightless against the sky. It has been adapted by Environment Canada and the city of Montreal and is now known as the Biosphere, an environmental water-monitoring center on the St. Lawrence River.
74. German Pavilion
Barcelona, Spain
The German Pavilion at the Barcelona Universal Exhibition of 1929, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is the first built expression of what he calledthe architecture of almost nothing. About a decade earlier he had designed projects for multistory tower blocks, crystal prisms whose uninterrupted glass skins enveloped slender steel frames. They were just ideas, but the Barcelona Pavilion, as it is popularly known, set a standardsome would say, generated a fashionfor the austere minimalist architecture that would be dubbed the International Style at an exhibition in New Yorks Museum of Modern Art just three years later. Esthetically, it was a major development in modern architecture. The temporary single-story building, constructed in 1928 1929 and opened in May 1929, exhibited nothing but itself, a pristine, new kind of architectural space. The only purpose it had to serve was brief: to house a reception for the king and queen of Spain when they attended the official opening. For them, Mies designed the now-famous Barcelona chair, handcrafted from stainless steel and covered in white pigskin. The commanding location of the pavilion took advantage of the flow of visitors between the other display halls and the rest of the exhibition. It stood on a low travertine platform that gave a good view of the grounds and beyond to the city. The northern half of the podium was covered by a flat roof, carried on two rows of equally spaced, cruciform steel columns and an asymmetrical series of discontinuous walls of marble, glass, and onyx, parallel or perpendicular to each other. None of the rectilinear spaces thus formed was fully definedthat is, they formed an open planand the interior and the exterior of the pavilion were treated in the same way. This was the kind of spatial organization that Mies had observed in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright twenty years earlier. The attention to reductive detail and fine finish was the Germans own. His most often quoted axioms wereLess is more andGod is in the details. A minimalist approach probably was justifiable for the Barcelona Pavilion because the building had no set functional program. It was in essence architecture as sculpture, an end in itself. But Mies also applied the philosophy to more functionally complex buildings. An almost contemporary example was the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia commissioned in 1927, it was completed in 1930. Then in 1945 he designed a small weekend house in 9 acres 3.6 hectares of woodland and fields on the bank of the Fox River south of Plano, Illinois, for his mistress, the Chicago physician Edith Farnswortha single room partitioned by a core that includes a kitchen, a fireplace, bathrooms, and a service area. The house is a mechanically perfect cuboid carried on a skeleton frame of sandblasted steel channels and defined by 9-foot 2.7-meter glass walls and concrete floor and roof slabs. Interior finishes include a travertine floor, natural timber fittings, and a stainless-steel counter in the kitchen. Such obsession with refinement, causing Mies to take his architecture of almost nothing almost to the limit, did little to create a comfortable living space. It may have been admirable architecture it was hardly congenial. It is emphasized that the issue was unimportant in the case of the German Pavilion at Barcelona, which was built simply to be seen and admiredas someone called it,a place for contemplative lingering. When the Barcelona Universal Exhibition closed, the German government tried to sell the pavilion to the municipality, without success. It was taken down in January 1930. It was not until 1983 that the Mies van der Rohe Foundation was established to reconstruct the building in Montju
The German Pavilion at the Barcelona Universal Exhibition of 1929, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is the first built expression of what he calledthe architecture of almost nothing. About a decade earlier he had designed projects for multistory tower blocks, crystal prisms whose uninterrupted glass skins enveloped slender steel frames. They were just ideas, but the Barcelona Pavilion, as it is popularly known, set a standardsome would say, generated a fashionfor the austere minimalist architecture that would be dubbed the International Style at an exhibition in New Yorks Museum of Modern Art just three years later. Esthetically, it was a major development in modern architecture. The temporary single-story building, constructed in 1928 1929 and opened in May 1929, exhibited nothing but itself, a pristine, new kind of architectural space. The only purpose it had to serve was brief: to house a reception for the king and queen of Spain when they attended the official opening. For them, Mies designed the now-famous Barcelona chair, handcrafted from stainless steel and covered in white pigskin. The commanding location of the pavilion took advantage of the flow of visitors between the other display halls and the rest of the exhibition. It stood on a low travertine platform that gave a good view of the grounds and beyond to the city. The northern half of the podium was covered by a flat roof, carried on two rows of equally spaced, cruciform steel columns and an asymmetrical series of discontinuous walls of marble, glass, and onyx, parallel or perpendicular to each other. None of the rectilinear spaces thus formed was fully definedthat is, they formed an open planand the interior and the exterior of the pavilion were treated in the same way. This was the kind of spatial organization that Mies had observed in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright twenty years earlier. The attention to reductive detail and fine finish was the Germans own. His most often quoted axioms wereLess is more andGod is in the details. A minimalist approach probably was justifiable for the Barcelona Pavilion because the building had no set functional program. It was in essence architecture as sculpture, an end in itself. But Mies also applied the philosophy to more functionally complex buildings. An almost contemporary example was the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia commissioned in 1927, it was completed in 1930. Then in 1945 he designed a small weekend house in 9 acres 3.6 hectares of woodland and fields on the bank of the Fox River south of Plano, Illinois, for his mistress, the Chicago physician Edith Farnswortha single room partitioned by a core that includes a kitchen, a fireplace, bathrooms, and a service area. The house is a mechanically perfect cuboid carried on a skeleton frame of sandblasted steel channels and defined by 9-foot 2.7-meter glass walls and concrete floor and roof slabs. Interior finishes include a travertine floor, natural timber fittings, and a stainless-steel counter in the kitchen. Such obsession with refinement, causing Mies to take his architecture of almost nothing almost to the limit, did little to create a comfortable living space. It may have been admirable architecture it was hardly congenial. It is emphasized that the issue was unimportant in the case of the German Pavilion at Barcelona, which was built simply to be seen and admiredas someone called it,a place for contemplative lingering. When the Barcelona Universal Exhibition closed, the German government tried to sell the pavilion to the municipality, without success. It was taken down in January 1930. It was not until 1983 that the Mies van der Rohe Foundation was established to reconstruct the building in Montju
75. Golden Gate Bridge
San Francisco, California
When it opened to traffic in May 1937, San Franciscos Golden Gate Bridge boasted the longest single clear span in the world, a claim held true for twenty-seven years. The center span, at 4,200 feet 1,285 meters, was three times longer than the Brooklyn Bridge and 700 feet 214 meters longer than the recently completed George Washington Bridge in New York. Including the two side spans of 1,125 feet 344 meters and the 90-foot-wide 27.5-meter road approaches, its total length was 8,981 feet 2,746 meters. Its towers were the tallest, its main cables the thickest and longest, its submarine foundations the largest ever built. Moreover, the foundation piers of the Golden Gate Bridge were built in the surging currents of the sea and its superstructure was erected across a canyon through which the wind howled at speeds up to 60 mph 96 kph. And all this was achieved without government funding in the midst of a deep economic depression. Against all the odds, the Golden Gate Bridge was a brilliant answer to a whole cluster ofinsoluble problems. On 5 August 1775 Lieutenant Don Juan Manuel Ayala of the Spanish navy sailed the San Carlos from the Pacific Ocean into San Francisco Bay through the 3-mile-long by 1-mile-wide 4.8-by-1.6-kilometer strait now known as the Golden Gate one Captain John Fremont of the U.S. Army Topographical Engineers named it some 60 years later after Turkeys Golden Horn. There is a compelling myth that the San Francisco eccentric Joshua Norton, self-styledNorton the First, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, decreed in 1869 that a bridge be built across the Golden Gate. The story may have become confused with his pronouncement of March 1872 ordering a bridge across the Bay between Oakland Point and Goat Island, an idea he probably gleaned from well-publicized current transportation debates. In fact, the possibility of spanning the Golden Gate was first raised in 1872 by the railroad owner Charles Crocker, who naturally wanted to build a railroad bridge. But little more was heard of the matter until July 1916. James Wilkins, editor of the San Francisco Call Bulletin, began a campaign that provoked City Engineer Michael OShaughnessy to seek, nationwide, the opinion of engineers on the project. Most said a bridge could not be built the objections raised included the width of the strait, persistent foggy conditions, high winds and ocean currents, and not least, the high cost: some forecast $100 million. However, the experienced Chicago bridge builder Joseph Baermann Strauss 1870 1938 believed that a bridge was feasible and that it could be built for under $30 million. In June 1921 he proffered a preliminary design for a railroad trestle with a cost estimated at $27 million. Then he energetically tried to convince local politicians that he was right. Although urban growth and traffic congestion led to an urgent need to cross the Golden Gate, all available state and federal finance had then been diverted to other projects. In 1922 OShaughnessy, Strauss, and Edward Rainey, secretary to San Franciscos mayor James Rolph Jr., proposed the formation of a special bridge district comprising the twenty-one affected counties to oversee financing, design, and construction of the bridge. The California State legislature passed the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District Act in May 1923. In December 1924 the War Department authorized San Francisco and Marin Counties to construct a bridge. Despite opposition from vested interests, the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District was immediately formed to realize the project. Eleven engineering firms submitted proposals, and Strauss, assisted by Clifford Paine, was selected as chief engineer in August 1929. Consulting engineers Othmar Amman and Leon Moisseiff, both of New York, and Professor Charles Derleth Jr. of the University of California were appointed. The consulting architects were the husband-wife team of Irving and Gertrude Morrow. Strauss, who had never designed a suspension bridge, first proposed an inelegant cantilever-cum-suspension structure, but Moisseiff, convinced that a simple suspension bridge was possible although such a span had never been attempted, helped refine the design that was eventually built. The architects did their part, too, designing handrails and light poles, tapering the tower portals, and designing lighting, all to emphasize the bridges simple beauty. And, setting aside the conventional paint colors used on bridges, they selected the distinctiveinternational airways orange for which the Golden Gate Bridge is famous. That, Irving Morrow believed, would look better in the spectacular landscape and would be more visible in the sea mists for which the Bay Area is noted. In August 1930 the War Department approved a 4,200-foot 1,285-meter main span, 220 feet 67 meters above the sea. Although the United States was sunk in the Great Depression, a $35 million bond issue to finance the bridge received overwhelming popular support. Contracts worth $23.8 million were let in November 1932, and construction started the following January. Over the next four years it proceeded in the face of many natural problemsrapid sea currents, frequent fogs, and high windsand technical ones, especially the construction of earthquake-resistant piers in 100 feet of open water. The latter was solved by building elliptical concrete fenders, 300 feet long and 155 wide 92 by 48 meters, within which the 148,000-ton 134,500-tonne concrete piers could be poured rising 15 feet 4.6 meters above high-water mark, the fenders also protect the piers from the onslaught of the sea. The piers and the approach trestles were completed by December 1934 and the 121-foot-wide 37-meter, 750-foot-high 230-meter towers were standing a little over six months later. The steel sections for the towers, fabricated in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, were sent via East Coast seaports through the Panama Canal to McClintic-Marshalls yards in Alameda. Then they were carried by lighters to the site, lifted by cranes, and erected by teams of riggers. Catwalks spanned the Golden Gate by July 1935, and John A. Roebling and Sons of New Jersey began spinning the two main cables from the San Francisco and Marin anchorages four months later. Each galvanized steel cable is 36.375 inches 920 millimeters in diameter, comprising 61 strands of 452 wires. They were completed by March 1936, and the roadway steel was placed from June through November, allowing construction of the flexible in situ concrete road deck, finished by April 1937. The bridge was opened to pedestrian traffic on 27 May 1937 and to vehicles at noon the following day. It had been achieved ahead of schedule and under budget. An estimated 200,000 people walked over it on the first day, and a weeklong Golden Gate Bridge Fiesta celebrated the event with fireworks, parades, and other entertainment.
When it opened to traffic in May 1937, San Franciscos Golden Gate Bridge boasted the longest single clear span in the world, a claim held true for twenty-seven years. The center span, at 4,200 feet 1,285 meters, was three times longer than the Brooklyn Bridge and 700 feet 214 meters longer than the recently completed George Washington Bridge in New York. Including the two side spans of 1,125 feet 344 meters and the 90-foot-wide 27.5-meter road approaches, its total length was 8,981 feet 2,746 meters. Its towers were the tallest, its main cables the thickest and longest, its submarine foundations the largest ever built. Moreover, the foundation piers of the Golden Gate Bridge were built in the surging currents of the sea and its superstructure was erected across a canyon through which the wind howled at speeds up to 60 mph 96 kph. And all this was achieved without government funding in the midst of a deep economic depression. Against all the odds, the Golden Gate Bridge was a brilliant answer to a whole cluster ofinsoluble problems. On 5 August 1775 Lieutenant Don Juan Manuel Ayala of the Spanish navy sailed the San Carlos from the Pacific Ocean into San Francisco Bay through the 3-mile-long by 1-mile-wide 4.8-by-1.6-kilometer strait now known as the Golden Gate one Captain John Fremont of the U.S. Army Topographical Engineers named it some 60 years later after Turkeys Golden Horn. There is a compelling myth that the San Francisco eccentric Joshua Norton, self-styledNorton the First, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, decreed in 1869 that a bridge be built across the Golden Gate. The story may have become confused with his pronouncement of March 1872 ordering a bridge across the Bay between Oakland Point and Goat Island, an idea he probably gleaned from well-publicized current transportation debates. In fact, the possibility of spanning the Golden Gate was first raised in 1872 by the railroad owner Charles Crocker, who naturally wanted to build a railroad bridge. But little more was heard of the matter until July 1916. James Wilkins, editor of the San Francisco Call Bulletin, began a campaign that provoked City Engineer Michael OShaughnessy to seek, nationwide, the opinion of engineers on the project. Most said a bridge could not be built the objections raised included the width of the strait, persistent foggy conditions, high winds and ocean currents, and not least, the high cost: some forecast $100 million. However, the experienced Chicago bridge builder Joseph Baermann Strauss 1870 1938 believed that a bridge was feasible and that it could be built for under $30 million. In June 1921 he proffered a preliminary design for a railroad trestle with a cost estimated at $27 million. Then he energetically tried to convince local politicians that he was right. Although urban growth and traffic congestion led to an urgent need to cross the Golden Gate, all available state and federal finance had then been diverted to other projects. In 1922 OShaughnessy, Strauss, and Edward Rainey, secretary to San Franciscos mayor James Rolph Jr., proposed the formation of a special bridge district comprising the twenty-one affected counties to oversee financing, design, and construction of the bridge. The California State legislature passed the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District Act in May 1923. In December 1924 the War Department authorized San Francisco and Marin Counties to construct a bridge. Despite opposition from vested interests, the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District was immediately formed to realize the project. Eleven engineering firms submitted proposals, and Strauss, assisted by Clifford Paine, was selected as chief engineer in August 1929. Consulting engineers Othmar Amman and Leon Moisseiff, both of New York, and Professor Charles Derleth Jr. of the University of California were appointed. The consulting architects were the husband-wife team of Irving and Gertrude Morrow. Strauss, who had never designed a suspension bridge, first proposed an inelegant cantilever-cum-suspension structure, but Moisseiff, convinced that a simple suspension bridge was possible although such a span had never been attempted, helped refine the design that was eventually built. The architects did their part, too, designing handrails and light poles, tapering the tower portals, and designing lighting, all to emphasize the bridges simple beauty. And, setting aside the conventional paint colors used on bridges, they selected the distinctiveinternational airways orange for which the Golden Gate Bridge is famous. That, Irving Morrow believed, would look better in the spectacular landscape and would be more visible in the sea mists for which the Bay Area is noted. In August 1930 the War Department approved a 4,200-foot 1,285-meter main span, 220 feet 67 meters above the sea. Although the United States was sunk in the Great Depression, a $35 million bond issue to finance the bridge received overwhelming popular support. Contracts worth $23.8 million were let in November 1932, and construction started the following January. Over the next four years it proceeded in the face of many natural problemsrapid sea currents, frequent fogs, and high windsand technical ones, especially the construction of earthquake-resistant piers in 100 feet of open water. The latter was solved by building elliptical concrete fenders, 300 feet long and 155 wide 92 by 48 meters, within which the 148,000-ton 134,500-tonne concrete piers could be poured rising 15 feet 4.6 meters above high-water mark, the fenders also protect the piers from the onslaught of the sea. The piers and the approach trestles were completed by December 1934 and the 121-foot-wide 37-meter, 750-foot-high 230-meter towers were standing a little over six months later. The steel sections for the towers, fabricated in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, were sent via East Coast seaports through the Panama Canal to McClintic-Marshalls yards in Alameda. Then they were carried by lighters to the site, lifted by cranes, and erected by teams of riggers. Catwalks spanned the Golden Gate by July 1935, and John A. Roebling and Sons of New Jersey began spinning the two main cables from the San Francisco and Marin anchorages four months later. Each galvanized steel cable is 36.375 inches 920 millimeters in diameter, comprising 61 strands of 452 wires. They were completed by March 1936, and the roadway steel was placed from June through November, allowing construction of the flexible in situ concrete road deck, finished by April 1937. The bridge was opened to pedestrian traffic on 27 May 1937 and to vehicles at noon the following day. It had been achieved ahead of schedule and under budget. An estimated 200,000 people walked over it on the first day, and a weeklong Golden Gate Bridge Fiesta celebrated the event with fireworks, parades, and other entertainment.
76. Grand Buddha
Leshan, China
Dafo Grand Buddha, the worlds largest figure of Buddha, provides tacit testimony to the engineering skills of medieval Chinese civilization. It is carved from the Xiluo Peak of Mount Lingyun, facing the town of Leshan in the Sichuan Province of the Peoples Republic of China. Work began on the 229-foot-high 71-meter seated figure in a.d. 713 and took 90 years to complete.Comparisons may give an idea of the ambitious scope of the project. Seated, the Grand Buddha is about 80 feet 25 meters taller than the figure of the Statue of Liberty were he standing, he would be over twice her height. His shoulders are 92 feet 28 meters wide and his head 48 feet 14.7 meters high the Washington head on Mount Rushmore is 60 feet 18.3 meters. The Buddhas big toe is 27 feet 8.3 meters long, and 100 people can easily stand together on his instep. The practice of creating large statues of the Buddha probably began in India and spread throughout Asia. Standing and seated figures and others in the lotus position can be found in Bilingsi, China Wat Thatorn, Thailand and Kamakura, Japan. But the only ones that approached the size of the Leshan Buddha were in the Bamian valley of Afghanistan. Tragically, the two third-century-a.d. sandstone carvings, 182 feet 55 meters and 125 feet 38 meters high, respectively, were wantonly destroyed by the fanatical Taliban in March 2001. The Leshan Buddha is in a serene region known asBuddhist Paradise andCelestial World on Earth, long associated with the religion in China. Nearby, the 10,000-foot 3,060-meter Mount Emei, one of four sacred Buddhist mountains, rises steeply above the Dadu River. Once there were perhaps 100 pilgrimage sitestemples and monasteriesthroughout its abundant forests. Many of them were originally Taoist foundations established during the Eastern Han dynasty under Emperor Ming a.d. 58 75 others were added during the Ming and Qing dynasties 1368 1911. Not all have survived. In the eighth century, Leshan, then known as Jiazhou, was a prosperous inland port and trading center. Silk and textiles from Chengdu, 105 miles 168 kilometers to the northeast, and the agricultural bounty of the Chuanxi Plains were shipped down the Minjiang River to join the Qingyi Jiang and the Dadu, waterways that opened trade routes to much of China. The confluence of these fast-flowing streams created dangerous turbulence above a deep hollow, and boats often capsized. There is a tradition that a monk named Hai Tong, from the nearby Lingyun Monastery, initiated the carving of the Grand Buddha to quieten the waters. Ironically, because of the magnitude of the undertaking, involving a large workforce for almost a century, he did not live to see the figure completed. It may be difficult for the modern mind to grasp the singleness of purpose, on the part of Hai Tong and the builders alike, necessary to sustain such a project for so long. Romantic tales are attached to the statue and the determined man who conceived it: he is said to have gouged out his eyes in some ruse to keep funding for the statue, and spent the remainder of his life in an abandoned cave tomb. As to the river, there is a tradition that it was calmed, perhaps because countless tons of discarded rock were thrown into the pool that caused the problem, perhaps by the watchful presence of D
Dafo Grand Buddha, the worlds largest figure of Buddha, provides tacit testimony to the engineering skills of medieval Chinese civilization. It is carved from the Xiluo Peak of Mount Lingyun, facing the town of Leshan in the Sichuan Province of the Peoples Republic of China. Work began on the 229-foot-high 71-meter seated figure in a.d. 713 and took 90 years to complete.Comparisons may give an idea of the ambitious scope of the project. Seated, the Grand Buddha is about 80 feet 25 meters taller than the figure of the Statue of Liberty were he standing, he would be over twice her height. His shoulders are 92 feet 28 meters wide and his head 48 feet 14.7 meters high the Washington head on Mount Rushmore is 60 feet 18.3 meters. The Buddhas big toe is 27 feet 8.3 meters long, and 100 people can easily stand together on his instep. The practice of creating large statues of the Buddha probably began in India and spread throughout Asia. Standing and seated figures and others in the lotus position can be found in Bilingsi, China Wat Thatorn, Thailand and Kamakura, Japan. But the only ones that approached the size of the Leshan Buddha were in the Bamian valley of Afghanistan. Tragically, the two third-century-a.d. sandstone carvings, 182 feet 55 meters and 125 feet 38 meters high, respectively, were wantonly destroyed by the fanatical Taliban in March 2001. The Leshan Buddha is in a serene region known asBuddhist Paradise andCelestial World on Earth, long associated with the religion in China. Nearby, the 10,000-foot 3,060-meter Mount Emei, one of four sacred Buddhist mountains, rises steeply above the Dadu River. Once there were perhaps 100 pilgrimage sitestemples and monasteriesthroughout its abundant forests. Many of them were originally Taoist foundations established during the Eastern Han dynasty under Emperor Ming a.d. 58 75 others were added during the Ming and Qing dynasties 1368 1911. Not all have survived. In the eighth century, Leshan, then known as Jiazhou, was a prosperous inland port and trading center. Silk and textiles from Chengdu, 105 miles 168 kilometers to the northeast, and the agricultural bounty of the Chuanxi Plains were shipped down the Minjiang River to join the Qingyi Jiang and the Dadu, waterways that opened trade routes to much of China. The confluence of these fast-flowing streams created dangerous turbulence above a deep hollow, and boats often capsized. There is a tradition that a monk named Hai Tong, from the nearby Lingyun Monastery, initiated the carving of the Grand Buddha to quieten the waters. Ironically, because of the magnitude of the undertaking, involving a large workforce for almost a century, he did not live to see the figure completed. It may be difficult for the modern mind to grasp the singleness of purpose, on the part of Hai Tong and the builders alike, necessary to sustain such a project for so long. Romantic tales are attached to the statue and the determined man who conceived it: he is said to have gouged out his eyes in some ruse to keep funding for the statue, and spent the remainder of his life in an abandoned cave tomb. As to the river, there is a tradition that it was calmed, perhaps because countless tons of discarded rock were thrown into the pool that caused the problem, perhaps by the watchful presence of D
77. Grand Coulee Dam
Washington State
Commenced during the Great Depression, Washington States Grand Coulee Dam, on the Columbia River about 88 miles 142 kilometers west of Spokane, is a monument to engineering prowess and to the resolve of those people who for 23 years fought for its creation. The key to the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project, it provides the region with electric power, irrigation, and flood control and contributes to wildlife conservation. The Grand Coulee Dam is the largest concrete structure ever built in the United States and the nations largest hydroelectric facility. Its 550-foot-high 168-meter gravity-type concrete wall, 500 feet 152 meters thick at the base, spans a little under 1 mile 1,592 meters and raises the water surface 350 feet above the former riverbed. Nearly 12 million cubic yards over 9 million cubic meters of concrete were needed to build it. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Lake often simply called Roosevelt Lake, created by the dam, has a 600-mile 960-kilometer shoreline and extends 150 miles 240 kilometers to the Canadian border. After several ruinous years of drought in the Northwest early in the twentieth century, the U.S. Reclamation Service Bureau now the Bureau of Reclamation considered pumping water from the Columbia River to irrigate agricultural land in eastern Washington, a region then served by artesian wells. In 1917 an Ephrata attorney named William Clapp proposed an alternative: build a high-level dam on the Columbia and raise water to the Grand Coulee, the 50-mile-long 80-kilometer natural channel of the old riverbed, thereby opening up more than 1 million acres 403,230 hectares of irrigated farmland. Rufus Woods, editor of the Wenatchee Daily World, publicized the notion a few months later. In 1919 the Michigan lawyer James OSullivan became interested enough to put it before the Reclamation Service, which directed Washington States Columbia Basin Survey Commission to include it in a current feasibility study focused on irrigating the basin by gravity canals from the Pend Oreille River. In the teeth of opposition from vested interests connected with the latter scheme, the dams protagonists managed to enthuse, among others, A. P. Davis, director of the Reclamation Service. At OSullivans prompting, Davis suggested that the state commission an objective report from Seattle engineer Willis Batchelor, who in 1921 recommended a dam on the Columbia, 220 feet 67 meters above river level. Several years of argument followed. In 1923 George Goethals of Panama Canal fameapparently a paid prophetendorsed the canal system, and two years later the federal Columbia Basin Survey Board of Engineers supported his view. But OSullivan, Woods, Clapp, and others unflaggingly kept the dam project alive, and in 1927 the U.S. Senate authorized the Army Corps of Engineers, under Major John Butler, to look for possible sites during a 1929 survey of the upper Columbia River. In June the Columbia River Development League was formed with Woods as president and OSullivan as secretary. The Wenatchee Daily World became its mouthpiece. Late in 1931 Butler told Congress that a dam was more economical than a gravity canal: besides providing irrigation and flood control, it would raise revenue from electrical energy. OSullivan lobbied for authorization, and the Bureau of Reclamation soon recommended development of the project, almost in the form in which it was eventually realized. In 1933 the Columbia Basin Commission was established, and the state of Washington committed $377,000 to the Grand Coulee Dam. Recently elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt allocated $63 million under the Public Works Administrationa New Deal program. Through the Great Depression men and women from all over the United States would find work at the dam site: averaging 3,000, the labor force peaked at 6,000. Excavation began in December 1933, and seven months later a $29.34 million contract for the foundation work was awarded to MWAK, a consortium formed by Silas Mason Company of New York City Walsh Construction Company of Davenport, Iowa and the Atkinson-Kier Company of San Francisco. Such a large undertaking called for a complex infrastructure: high-tension power lines were set up, the Columbia River was bridged, and over 30 miles nearly 50 kilometers of railroad and 60 miles of sealed roads were constructed. A contractors town, Mason City, and Coulee Dam, a government town, were built at the site. Four years later, a consortium formed by linking MWAK and the Six CompaniesKaiser Construction of Seattle Morrison Knudsen of Boise, Idaho Utah Construction J. F. Shea Pacific Bridge and McDonald and Kahn all of San Francisco and General Construction Company of Seattlewon the $34.4 million contract for the completion of the dam. Their bid was 80 percent of the only other tender. The proposed height of the dam had been determined by the rather parochial notion that the impounded water should not back up beyond the Canadian border. Then the projects main reason for being was irrigationthere were more droughts in the early 1930sand flood control, rather than power generation. The Pacific Northwest had plenty of electricity and there was little prospect of industrial expansion. Therefore the original designs included a 350-foot 107-meterlow dam about 3,500 feet 1,070 meters long, which would bring the water surface to only 150 feet 46 meters above the river level. Should the demand for power increase, it was intended to later raise the wall. That was flawed thinking. Achieving a tight joint between the two parts of the wall would have been difficult, even dangerous later changes to the turbines would be costly and it was more expedient to construct the concrete foundation of a high dam at the start of the project. So, with the approval of Congress, the contracts were redrawn in June 1935 to build the high dam to plans by John Lucian, chief designer of BuRec engineers. The main dam was completed by 1941 and work commenced on the pumping plant and powerhouses. The entry of the United States into World War II meant dramatic changes in priorities for the dam. Power generation was given first place because the regions aluminum industry, a large consumer of electricity, was critical to the defense effort. Six generators were commissioned at the Grand Coulee, and two more were borrowed from the incomplete Shasta Dam project in northern California. Soon after the war, construction resumed on the pumping plant and in 1951 the irrigation system was inaugurated. Six huge pumps lifted water through 280 feet 85.6 meters from Roosevelt Lake to Banks Lake equalizing reservoir in the Grand Coulee. In 1973 two more reversible pump-generator units were installed, followed by another four late in 1983. Feeding more than 300 miles 480 kilometers of associated canals, and nearly 5,500 miles 8,800 kilometers of laterals, siphons, and drains, the pumps can fully supply almost 1.1 million acres about 440,000 hectares of formerly dry land. They are not yet being used at their full capacity. The reversible pump-generators installed could of course be used for power generation, augmenting the already remarkable output of the Grand Coulee Dam, whose power production facilities are by far the largest in North America. Two plants, with a total of eighteen generators, were operational by 1951. A third, coming on line in 1975, increased capacity to about 7,200 megawatts. By 1978 the three were producing over 6,000 megawatts, and subsequently additional generatorsthe total number is now 33have achieved an output of over 6,800 megawatts. In the 1950s the American Society of Civil Engineers included the Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia Basin Project among the seven civil-engineering wonders of the United States. The project has also been popularly and superlatively dubbedthe Eighth Wonder of the World,the Greatest Structure in the World,the Worlds Greatest Engineering Wonder, andthe Biggest Thing on Earth.
Commenced during the Great Depression, Washington States Grand Coulee Dam, on the Columbia River about 88 miles 142 kilometers west of Spokane, is a monument to engineering prowess and to the resolve of those people who for 23 years fought for its creation. The key to the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project, it provides the region with electric power, irrigation, and flood control and contributes to wildlife conservation. The Grand Coulee Dam is the largest concrete structure ever built in the United States and the nations largest hydroelectric facility. Its 550-foot-high 168-meter gravity-type concrete wall, 500 feet 152 meters thick at the base, spans a little under 1 mile 1,592 meters and raises the water surface 350 feet above the former riverbed. Nearly 12 million cubic yards over 9 million cubic meters of concrete were needed to build it. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Lake often simply called Roosevelt Lake, created by the dam, has a 600-mile 960-kilometer shoreline and extends 150 miles 240 kilometers to the Canadian border. After several ruinous years of drought in the Northwest early in the twentieth century, the U.S. Reclamation Service Bureau now the Bureau of Reclamation considered pumping water from the Columbia River to irrigate agricultural land in eastern Washington, a region then served by artesian wells. In 1917 an Ephrata attorney named William Clapp proposed an alternative: build a high-level dam on the Columbia and raise water to the Grand Coulee, the 50-mile-long 80-kilometer natural channel of the old riverbed, thereby opening up more than 1 million acres 403,230 hectares of irrigated farmland. Rufus Woods, editor of the Wenatchee Daily World, publicized the notion a few months later. In 1919 the Michigan lawyer James OSullivan became interested enough to put it before the Reclamation Service, which directed Washington States Columbia Basin Survey Commission to include it in a current feasibility study focused on irrigating the basin by gravity canals from the Pend Oreille River. In the teeth of opposition from vested interests connected with the latter scheme, the dams protagonists managed to enthuse, among others, A. P. Davis, director of the Reclamation Service. At OSullivans prompting, Davis suggested that the state commission an objective report from Seattle engineer Willis Batchelor, who in 1921 recommended a dam on the Columbia, 220 feet 67 meters above river level. Several years of argument followed. In 1923 George Goethals of Panama Canal fameapparently a paid prophetendorsed the canal system, and two years later the federal Columbia Basin Survey Board of Engineers supported his view. But OSullivan, Woods, Clapp, and others unflaggingly kept the dam project alive, and in 1927 the U.S. Senate authorized the Army Corps of Engineers, under Major John Butler, to look for possible sites during a 1929 survey of the upper Columbia River. In June the Columbia River Development League was formed with Woods as president and OSullivan as secretary. The Wenatchee Daily World became its mouthpiece. Late in 1931 Butler told Congress that a dam was more economical than a gravity canal: besides providing irrigation and flood control, it would raise revenue from electrical energy. OSullivan lobbied for authorization, and the Bureau of Reclamation soon recommended development of the project, almost in the form in which it was eventually realized. In 1933 the Columbia Basin Commission was established, and the state of Washington committed $377,000 to the Grand Coulee Dam. Recently elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt allocated $63 million under the Public Works Administrationa New Deal program. Through the Great Depression men and women from all over the United States would find work at the dam site: averaging 3,000, the labor force peaked at 6,000. Excavation began in December 1933, and seven months later a $29.34 million contract for the foundation work was awarded to MWAK, a consortium formed by Silas Mason Company of New York City Walsh Construction Company of Davenport, Iowa and the Atkinson-Kier Company of San Francisco. Such a large undertaking called for a complex infrastructure: high-tension power lines were set up, the Columbia River was bridged, and over 30 miles nearly 50 kilometers of railroad and 60 miles of sealed roads were constructed. A contractors town, Mason City, and Coulee Dam, a government town, were built at the site. Four years later, a consortium formed by linking MWAK and the Six CompaniesKaiser Construction of Seattle Morrison Knudsen of Boise, Idaho Utah Construction J. F. Shea Pacific Bridge and McDonald and Kahn all of San Francisco and General Construction Company of Seattlewon the $34.4 million contract for the completion of the dam. Their bid was 80 percent of the only other tender. The proposed height of the dam had been determined by the rather parochial notion that the impounded water should not back up beyond the Canadian border. Then the projects main reason for being was irrigationthere were more droughts in the early 1930sand flood control, rather than power generation. The Pacific Northwest had plenty of electricity and there was little prospect of industrial expansion. Therefore the original designs included a 350-foot 107-meterlow dam about 3,500 feet 1,070 meters long, which would bring the water surface to only 150 feet 46 meters above the river level. Should the demand for power increase, it was intended to later raise the wall. That was flawed thinking. Achieving a tight joint between the two parts of the wall would have been difficult, even dangerous later changes to the turbines would be costly and it was more expedient to construct the concrete foundation of a high dam at the start of the project. So, with the approval of Congress, the contracts were redrawn in June 1935 to build the high dam to plans by John Lucian, chief designer of BuRec engineers. The main dam was completed by 1941 and work commenced on the pumping plant and powerhouses. The entry of the United States into World War II meant dramatic changes in priorities for the dam. Power generation was given first place because the regions aluminum industry, a large consumer of electricity, was critical to the defense effort. Six generators were commissioned at the Grand Coulee, and two more were borrowed from the incomplete Shasta Dam project in northern California. Soon after the war, construction resumed on the pumping plant and in 1951 the irrigation system was inaugurated. Six huge pumps lifted water through 280 feet 85.6 meters from Roosevelt Lake to Banks Lake equalizing reservoir in the Grand Coulee. In 1973 two more reversible pump-generator units were installed, followed by another four late in 1983. Feeding more than 300 miles 480 kilometers of associated canals, and nearly 5,500 miles 8,800 kilometers of laterals, siphons, and drains, the pumps can fully supply almost 1.1 million acres about 440,000 hectares of formerly dry land. They are not yet being used at their full capacity. The reversible pump-generators installed could of course be used for power generation, augmenting the already remarkable output of the Grand Coulee Dam, whose power production facilities are by far the largest in North America. Two plants, with a total of eighteen generators, were operational by 1951. A third, coming on line in 1975, increased capacity to about 7,200 megawatts. By 1978 the three were producing over 6,000 megawatts, and subsequently additional generatorsthe total number is now 33have achieved an output of over 6,800 megawatts. In the 1950s the American Society of Civil Engineers included the Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia Basin Project among the seven civil-engineering wonders of the United States. The project has also been popularly and superlatively dubbedthe Eighth Wonder of the World,the Greatest Structure in the World,the Worlds Greatest Engineering Wonder, andthe Biggest Thing on Earth.
78. La Grande Arche
Paris, France
La Grande Arche is the paramount landmark, the crowning monument of Pariss Place de la Defense. It is the eastern terminus of the monumental Voie Triomphale Triumphal Way, extending from the Cour Carree of the Louvre through the Tuileries Gardens and down the Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe the axis then continues for almost 4 miles 6 kilometers along the Avenue de la Grande Armee and through La place de la Concorde to cross the Pont de Neuilly and enter La Defense. La Defense is dominated by ultramodern geometric office or apartment towers, 30 stories high and more, apparently randomly arranged over a large, paved plane. It also boasts conference centers, an exhibition hall, gardens, and a massive public pedestrian open space, beneath which is Pariss largest shopping complex, restaurants, and a cinema. It was conceived in 1931, when a competition was held to extend the Louvre Champs Elysees axis. None of the thirty-five classical revival or modernist entries from French architects was realized. The aim had been to continue the French tradition of innovative architecture but for various reasons, no doubt including the 1930s Depression and World War II, little of the kind was built. In 1951, La Defense was zoned for commercial use, and seven years later a specifically appointed agency produced a thirty-year master plan revised in 1964, it provided for twenty towers, each of twenty-five stories. Developers and the public disagreed over taller buildings, but the mediocre developmentsomeone has described them asall of the postmodernist
La Grande Arche is the paramount landmark, the crowning monument of Pariss Place de la Defense. It is the eastern terminus of the monumental Voie Triomphale Triumphal Way, extending from the Cour Carree of the Louvre through the Tuileries Gardens and down the Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe the axis then continues for almost 4 miles 6 kilometers along the Avenue de la Grande Armee and through La place de la Concorde to cross the Pont de Neuilly and enter La Defense. La Defense is dominated by ultramodern geometric office or apartment towers, 30 stories high and more, apparently randomly arranged over a large, paved plane. It also boasts conference centers, an exhibition hall, gardens, and a massive public pedestrian open space, beneath which is Pariss largest shopping complex, restaurants, and a cinema. It was conceived in 1931, when a competition was held to extend the Louvre Champs Elysees axis. None of the thirty-five classical revival or modernist entries from French architects was realized. The aim had been to continue the French tradition of innovative architecture but for various reasons, no doubt including the 1930s Depression and World War II, little of the kind was built. In 1951, La Defense was zoned for commercial use, and seven years later a specifically appointed agency produced a thirty-year master plan revised in 1964, it provided for twenty towers, each of twenty-five stories. Developers and the public disagreed over taller buildings, but the mediocre developmentsomeone has described them asall of the postmodernist
79. Great Pyramid of Cheops
Giza, Egypt
In the western suburbs of modern Cairo, 130 feet above the Nile, stands a 1-mile 1.6-kilometer square artificial rocky plateau called Giza El-Jizah by the Arabs. It is the site of three Fourth Dynasty pyramid tombsCheops, Chephrens, and Mycerinussnamed by the ancients among the seven wonders of the world. The largest of them, built at the command of Cheops, has been called aunique monument because of its internal disposition. While it is clearly part of an evolving architectural type, there is little doubt that in terms of engineering and logistics, this so-called Great Pyramid was a superlative achievement. Cheops, also known as Khufu Khnum-Khufwy,Protected by Khnum, was the second king of the Fourth Dynasty and reigned from 2589 to 2566 b.c. Although little is known of him, he is believed by some scholars to have been a tyrannical and cruel ruler. Whatever the case, clearly he was able to lead and coordinate, because the building of his tomb involved sophisticated social planning to harness an immense team of workers, both on and off the site, together with all the backup resources needed for such a daunting task. The fifth-century-b.c. Greek historian Herodotus calculated that 100,000 slaves would have taken 30 years to build the Great Pyramid. But it was not constructed by slave labor rather, Egypts peasant farmers, displaced from July through November when their fields were inundated by the annual flooding of the Nile, were deployed on the project, as well as on other public works. The cost of their food and shelter there were workers villages built nearby was met from their own surplus production, levied as taxes. Modern scholarship suggests that only 20,000 men could have completed Cheops tomb in only 20 years. The base of the Great Pyramid Akhet Cheops, the Horizon of Cheops, oriented within 0.3 minute of accuracy to the cardinal compass points, is 756 feet 230.5 meters square, covering 13 acres 5.2 hectares. The extensive base means that the tremendous weight of the tall 479-foot 146-meter building, amounting to an estimated 6.99 million tons 6.35 million tonnes, does not overload the foundation it is also very stable because its center of gravity is very low. Although of simple design, such an engineering feat challenges even the modern imagination. The pyramid is estimated to contain 2.5 million limestone blocks, each weighing anything from 3 to 17.7 tons 2.5 to 15 tonnes, rising in 200 steps to the height of a 40-story office block. The joints between the blocks are about 0.02 inch 0.5 millimeter. As originally designed, the pyramid was encased in a 16-foot-thick 5-meter layer of polished white limestone won from the quarries at Tura, east of the Nile. Most of it was plundered in the sixteenth century and used to build mosques in Cairo. At the pinnacle of the Great Pyramid there was a solid capstone of polished Aswan granite, standing on a 33-foot 10-meter square platform. All this, from quarrying to setting the stones, was achieved with copper and stone tools. Barges were used to transport blocks from a quarry on the far side of the Nile. How were they raised as the pyramid progressed? It is thought that ramped causeways, lubricated with water, were used to haul the sleds these may have been built at different levels on each side of the pyramid, or a single ramp may have wound around the whole structure as it rose. While oxen were used to move stone blocks in the quarry, the accuracy demanded on-site required wooden sleds hauled by men, and fewer than ten were needed to maneuver a block into place using wooden rockers. For all the looming size of the Great Pyramid, its interior spaces are relatively tiny. An entrance passagenot the originalconnects with a narrow, 345-foot-long 105-meter descending passage that leads to a 46-by-27-foot 14-by-8.3-meter subterranean room, a little over 11 feet 3.5 meters high. It has been suggested that this was the first location chosen for Cheops burial chamber that was quickly abandoned, probably on theological grounds. From the junction of the two passages, a 129-foot-long 39-meter ascending passage leads to the outer end of thegreat gallery. From that point, a horizontal corridor gives access to the so-called Queens Chamber, vaulted with inclined blocks a second alternative burial chamber, it was never completed and never used. The 154-foot-long, 28-foot-high 47-by-8.5-meter great gallery, with a finely crafted corbel vaulted ceiling, leads upward to the final location of the Kings Chamber, built of pink Aswan granite. The chamber still contains the huge red granite sarcophagus that must have been put in place while the pyramid was being built. Above it a series of five relieving chambers distributes the weight of the structure above away from the chamber. There are two shafts sealed at the extremities, through which the kings ka spirit could come and go from the underworld. Several ancillary buildings were associated with Cheops pyramid. Members of the royal family were buried in mastaba tombs, and three small pyramids to the east were probably for his sister-wife, Merites, and perhaps other queens. Nobles and courtiers were interred in the royal cemetery to the west of the Great Pyramid, where there were also funerary temples and processional ramps. All that remains of Cheops Mortuary Temple is some of the basalt paving. Since the early 1990s, there have been serious attempts to preserve the fabric of the Great Pyramid. It was restored in 1992. Recurring salt deposits, cracking, spalling of the limestone, and the appearance of black spots, all resulting from increases in humidity and carbon dioxide caused by large numbers of tourists, necessitated further action. Early in 1998 the building was closed to the public while a more efficient mechanical ventilation system was installed. It changes the air every 45 minutes, employing the original ka shafts from the Kings Chamber as exhaust ducts and drawing fresh air through the access passage. The number of daily visitors has been severely limited and airlines have been warned of ano-fly zone above the site.
In the western suburbs of modern Cairo, 130 feet above the Nile, stands a 1-mile 1.6-kilometer square artificial rocky plateau called Giza El-Jizah by the Arabs. It is the site of three Fourth Dynasty pyramid tombsCheops, Chephrens, and Mycerinussnamed by the ancients among the seven wonders of the world. The largest of them, built at the command of Cheops, has been called aunique monument because of its internal disposition. While it is clearly part of an evolving architectural type, there is little doubt that in terms of engineering and logistics, this so-called Great Pyramid was a superlative achievement. Cheops, also known as Khufu Khnum-Khufwy,Protected by Khnum, was the second king of the Fourth Dynasty and reigned from 2589 to 2566 b.c. Although little is known of him, he is believed by some scholars to have been a tyrannical and cruel ruler. Whatever the case, clearly he was able to lead and coordinate, because the building of his tomb involved sophisticated social planning to harness an immense team of workers, both on and off the site, together with all the backup resources needed for such a daunting task. The fifth-century-b.c. Greek historian Herodotus calculated that 100,000 slaves would have taken 30 years to build the Great Pyramid. But it was not constructed by slave labor rather, Egypts peasant farmers, displaced from July through November when their fields were inundated by the annual flooding of the Nile, were deployed on the project, as well as on other public works. The cost of their food and shelter there were workers villages built nearby was met from their own surplus production, levied as taxes. Modern scholarship suggests that only 20,000 men could have completed Cheops tomb in only 20 years. The base of the Great Pyramid Akhet Cheops, the Horizon of Cheops, oriented within 0.3 minute of accuracy to the cardinal compass points, is 756 feet 230.5 meters square, covering 13 acres 5.2 hectares. The extensive base means that the tremendous weight of the tall 479-foot 146-meter building, amounting to an estimated 6.99 million tons 6.35 million tonnes, does not overload the foundation it is also very stable because its center of gravity is very low. Although of simple design, such an engineering feat challenges even the modern imagination. The pyramid is estimated to contain 2.5 million limestone blocks, each weighing anything from 3 to 17.7 tons 2.5 to 15 tonnes, rising in 200 steps to the height of a 40-story office block. The joints between the blocks are about 0.02 inch 0.5 millimeter. As originally designed, the pyramid was encased in a 16-foot-thick 5-meter layer of polished white limestone won from the quarries at Tura, east of the Nile. Most of it was plundered in the sixteenth century and used to build mosques in Cairo. At the pinnacle of the Great Pyramid there was a solid capstone of polished Aswan granite, standing on a 33-foot 10-meter square platform. All this, from quarrying to setting the stones, was achieved with copper and stone tools. Barges were used to transport blocks from a quarry on the far side of the Nile. How were they raised as the pyramid progressed? It is thought that ramped causeways, lubricated with water, were used to haul the sleds these may have been built at different levels on each side of the pyramid, or a single ramp may have wound around the whole structure as it rose. While oxen were used to move stone blocks in the quarry, the accuracy demanded on-site required wooden sleds hauled by men, and fewer than ten were needed to maneuver a block into place using wooden rockers. For all the looming size of the Great Pyramid, its interior spaces are relatively tiny. An entrance passagenot the originalconnects with a narrow, 345-foot-long 105-meter descending passage that leads to a 46-by-27-foot 14-by-8.3-meter subterranean room, a little over 11 feet 3.5 meters high. It has been suggested that this was the first location chosen for Cheops burial chamber that was quickly abandoned, probably on theological grounds. From the junction of the two passages, a 129-foot-long 39-meter ascending passage leads to the outer end of thegreat gallery. From that point, a horizontal corridor gives access to the so-called Queens Chamber, vaulted with inclined blocks a second alternative burial chamber, it was never completed and never used. The 154-foot-long, 28-foot-high 47-by-8.5-meter great gallery, with a finely crafted corbel vaulted ceiling, leads upward to the final location of the Kings Chamber, built of pink Aswan granite. The chamber still contains the huge red granite sarcophagus that must have been put in place while the pyramid was being built. Above it a series of five relieving chambers distributes the weight of the structure above away from the chamber. There are two shafts sealed at the extremities, through which the kings ka spirit could come and go from the underworld. Several ancillary buildings were associated with Cheops pyramid. Members of the royal family were buried in mastaba tombs, and three small pyramids to the east were probably for his sister-wife, Merites, and perhaps other queens. Nobles and courtiers were interred in the royal cemetery to the west of the Great Pyramid, where there were also funerary temples and processional ramps. All that remains of Cheops Mortuary Temple is some of the basalt paving. Since the early 1990s, there have been serious attempts to preserve the fabric of the Great Pyramid. It was restored in 1992. Recurring salt deposits, cracking, spalling of the limestone, and the appearance of black spots, all resulting from increases in humidity and carbon dioxide caused by large numbers of tourists, necessitated further action. Early in 1998 the building was closed to the public while a more efficient mechanical ventilation system was installed. It changes the air every 45 minutes, employing the original ka shafts from the Kings Chamber as exhaust ducts and drawing fresh air through the access passage. The number of daily visitors has been severely limited and airlines have been warned of ano-fly zone above the site.
80. Great Wall of China
The largest man-made structure in the world, the Great Wall once stretched more than 4,500 miles 7,300 kilometers from the Jiayu Pass in Gansu Province in the west to the mouth of the Yalu River in Liaoning Province in the east. The ravages of time and vandalism have reduced it to 1,500 miles 2,400 kilometers. It has been called anengineering marvel of stone, earth and brick.
From 475 to 221 b.c., there were seven warring states in Chou dynasty, ChinaQi, Chu, Han, Wei, Qin, Yan, and Zhao. The borders of the latter three were frequently plundered by the nomadic Xiongnu Huns and Donghu tribes, so they built high earth walls as a defense against them. For their part, the remaining states took similar action, fearing attacks from their capricious neighbors. Soon after he had unified China in 221 b.c., the first emperor, the despotic Chin Shi Huangdi, set about reinforcing his defenses against the Xiongnu by joining four earlier fragmentary walls and building new sections to extend them to 3,100 miles 5,000 kilometers. In 214 b.c. he sent General Meng Tien, with an army of 300,000 conscripted workers and countless prisoners, to the northern frontiers of his empire to begin the building the Great Wall. Garrisons of soldiers along the wall served a double purpose: they stood guard over the workers and defended the northern boundaries. Much of the Chin wall was constructed with dry-laid local stone, but in remote places, where stone was unavailable, the builders used earth, compacted in 4-inch-thick 10-centimeter layers. Watch-towers were spaced two bow shots apart.
Chin Shi Huangdis policies of heavy taxation and forced labor to pay for foreign wars, the Wall, and other extravagant public works inevitably created social unrest. When he died in 210 b.c., his empire collapsed. Following years of chaos, the Han dynasty 206 b.c.-a.d. 220 was founded. Under Wu-Di reigned 140 87 b.c., the Han expanded into southern China, Vietnam, and Korea and opened trade routes through the wilderness of central Asia to India, Persia, and the Western world. Wu-Di controlled the Xiongnu incursions by invading their lands south of the Gobi Desert and colonizing the region with his own people. That strategy, incidentally, forced the Huns to move westward, part of a chain reaction that eventually brought about the demise of the Roman Empire. To protect what he had gained, Wu-Di inaugurated the third major phase of the Great Wall. He restored the Chin wallneglected for years, the
earthen parts had begun to collapseand extended it 300 miles 280 kilometers across the Gobi Desert. Han builders corrected the problem of the sandy soil by reinforcing the compacted earth with willow reeds. They also built beacon towers at 15- to 30-mile 25- to 50-kilometer intervals and used smoke signals to warn of attack. All trade routes passed through the Wall.
The final construction phase, which gave the Wall its present form, was undertaken early in the Ming dynasty 1368 1644. Having finally expelled the harassing Xiongnu and their Mongol rulers, the Ming emperors set about securing their empire. They repaired and enlarged the Wall, constructing extensions of tamped earth between kiln-fired brick facings across some of Chinas most mountainous terrain. The Ming wall averaged 25 feet 7.6 meters in height it was 15 to 30 feet 4.5 to 9 meters thick at the base, sloping to 12 feet 3.7 meters at the top. The watchtowers were redesigned and cannon, bought from the Portuguese, were strategically deployed.
For all its size and splendor, the Great Wall seems to have been a functional failure, with little military value. Only when China was weakened internally were northern invadersthe Mongols Yuan dynasty in 1271 and the Manchurians Qing dynasty in 1644able to seize power without engaging in an attenuated war. Since the seventeenth century parts of the Great Wall have been quarried for their brick or stone others have simply crumbled, while those in marshy areas have been buried by silt. Two stretchesthe Badaling and Mutianyu sectionsnorth of Beijing have been reconstructed and opened as a tourist attraction. In 1979, the Chinese government declared it a National Monument, establishing a commission to oversee its preservation in 1987 it was inscribed on UNESCOs World Heritage List.
