THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRIDGES
Elizabeth B. Mock
Elizabeth B. Mock: THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRIDGES. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949. First edition. Quarto. Blue cloth titled in white. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 128 pp. 170 black and white illustrations. Front endpapers offset from stored newsprint clippings. Jacket lightly edgeworn with top edge lightly chipped and a closed tear to the front panel. A nearly very good copy in a nearly very good dust jacket.
8.75 x 11.25 hardcover book with 128 pages and 170 black and white plates. From the publisher: "This picture-book traces the history of bridges in terms of the four materials -- stone, wood, metal and reinforced concrete, showing how each material suggests its own characteristic and effective treatment; how stone-builders lightened and articulated the massive Roman arch; how other builders have dealt with wood as vines, as sticks and now as laminated, molded plywood; how nineteenth and twentieth-century engineers asserted the special character of iron and steel in attenuated cables, filigreed arches and latticed trusses, and today are challenged by the opportunity for continuity of structure and surface that is possible in welded steel; how the plastic nature of the great twentieth-century material, reinforced concrete, came to flower in the beautiful bridges of the Swiss genius, Robert Maillart."
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Structural Types
- The Architecture of Bridges: includes Stone, Wood, Metal Arch, Suspension Cable, Metal Beam, Reinforced Concrete, Reinforced Concrete Arch, Reinforced Concrete: Beam and Rigid Frame
- Glossary
- Sources of Illustrations
Terence Riley noted that the early tastemakers at the Museum of Modern Art understood their job was to separate "the wheat from the chaff." Few people rose to that challenge with more vigor than Philip Johnson, the young head of the Department of Architecture and Design. Alfred Barr’s insistence on including Architecture and Design as a fully functioning department within MoMA was a radical curatorial departure, which seems only obvious today.
Philip Johnson's 1928 visit to the Bauhaus Dessau sparked Johnson's imagination and solidified his role as a proselytizer for the European avant-garde architecture. "We were proud to be avant-gardists; we wore our enthusiasm as a badge of honor that distinguished us as culturally superior to those around us." Johnson said.
From this plateau of cultural superiority, Johnson and his MoMA collaborators Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Henry-Russell Hitchcock eventually labeled this architecture “The International Style.” The rest is history.