Maillarts bridges

The Swiss engineer, architect, and artist Robert Maillart (1872 1940) exploited the structural strength and expressive potential of reinforced concrete to generate a modern form for his bridges. By using simple construction concepts he developed graceful structures based on flat or curved reinforced concrete slabs. Amongst his radically innovative ideas were the mushroom slab, the deck-stiffened arch, the open three-hinged arch, and the hollow-box arch. Maillarts biographer David Billington (1997, 2) asserts that the engineers elegance arose from structure itself and not from an extraneous idea of beauty.Taken singly or together, Maillarts bridges are engineering and architectural feats that elegantly demonstrated, as Le Corbusier claimed in Vers une Architecture (1923), that engineers recognized (long before architects) that beauty could be achieved through thoroughly defining and solving problems. That new approach to design lay at the foundation of modem architecture. Maillart studied civil engineering at Switzerlands Federal Technological Institute in Z