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Dictionary of Art
and Artists

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CHAPTER TWO
REALISM AND IMPRESSIONISM
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PAINTING
SCULPTURE
- Part 1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10
ARCHITECTURE
- Part 1,
2,
3
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ARCHITECTURE
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ROEBLING.
Only rarely could an engineering feat express the spirit of
the times. One of the few to do so was the Brooklyn Bridge, built by
John and Washington Roebling
(fig. 978),
which was referred to, appropriately enough, as
America's Arch of Triumph. It remains one of the outstanding
achievements of the Industrial Revolution. The massive towers
nevertheless incorporate aspects of Egyptian, Roman, and Gothic
architecture (note the pointed arches) to express a combination of
eternal strength, civic pride, and soaring spirituality. Small wonder it
was celebrated by poets and artists alike (see fig.
1071).

978. John and Washington Roebling
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The Brooklyn Bridge. New York. 1867-83
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John Augustus Roebling
John Augustus Roebling, (born , June 12, 1806, Mühlhausen,
Prussia—died July 22, 1869, Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., U.S.),
German-born U.S. civil engineer, a pioneer in the design of
steel suspension bridges. His best known work is the
Brooklyn Bridge, New York City, completed under the
direction of his eldest son, Washington Augustus, in 1883.
After graduating from the
polytechnic school in Berlin, Roebling worked for the
Prussian government for three years and at the age of 25
emigrated to the U.S. He settled with others from his
hometown in a small colony that was later called Saxonburg,
near Pittsburgh, in the hills of western Pennsylvania. He
married the daughter of another Mühlhausen emigrant, and
they had nine children. After a few years of unsuccessful
farming, John Roebling went to the state capital in
Harrisburg and applied for employment as a civil engineer.
He had often watched
canalboats being hauled over hills from one watershed to
another, and he persuaded the canal commissioners to let him
replace the hempen hawsers with wire cables. He developed
his own method for stranding and weaving wire cables, which
proved to be as strong and durable as he had predicted. The
demand for such cable soon became so great that he
established a factory to manufacture it in Trenton, N.J.
This was the beginning of an industrial complex that finally
was capable of producing everything from chicken wire to
enormous 36-inch (91-centimetre) cables. It remained a
family-owned business, carried on by three generations of
Roeblings.
Roebling was less a
businessman than an engineer, and with the growth of his
reputation as a designer and builder of long-span suspension
bridges, he spent less and less time at the Trenton factory.
His eldest son, Washington, joined him in his work, and in
the 1850s and 1860s they built four suspension bridges: two
at Pittsburgh, one at Niagara Falls, and another across the
Ohio River between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Covington, Ky.,
with a main span of 1,051 feet (320 metres). New York state
accepted Roebling’s design for a bridge connecting Brooklyn
and Manhattan with a span of 1,595 ft (486 m) and appointed
him chief engineer.
Work on the bridge cost
Roebling his life. He was taking final compass readings
while standing on some pilings at a ferry slip and did not
notice that a boat was docking. As it banged into the slip,
one of his feet was caught between the pilings. He was
rushed to his son’s house in Brooklyn Heights, where the
doctors amputated his injured toes. Three weeks later, he
died of tetanus at the age of 63. His son carried on his
work on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Encyclopædia
Britannica
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The Brooklyn Bridge

The Brooklyn Bridge
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John Fowler and Benjamin Baker (eng.)
Firth of Forth Bridge, Scotland, 1882-1889
Most iron bridges in the nineteenth century were either
suspension bridges, or truss bridges that in principle used an open torn
of a beam set on two base points. With its passage through strong piers
projecting into the spanned space, the completion of the bridqe over the
Firth of Forth made the completion of a cantilever bridge famous. An
apparently small, in reality 100-metre-long, central girder closes the
gap between the main pylon's two freely projecting cantilever arms. Both
the bridge and the Eiffel Tower, built at the same time, invited the
viewer to observe the surrounding environment from the building itself,
"because the disturbing element is left out", as Wilhelm Westhofen wrote
in 1890. Public opinion about the construction had clearly changed since
the opening of London's Crystal Palace.
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In the press, the Hall of Machines was
naturally overshadowed by the Eiffel Tower. Gustave Eiffel, a commercial
engineer, personally assumed all the construction risks in order to
dissipate reservations about safety; he even added unnecessary elements
to the frame's static essentials simply to increase trust in its
stability.
Therefore the arch reaching up to the first platform is only
tacked on to the supporting structure and makes no contribution to
stability. The tower's basic form arose from the desire to contain
within the square of its cross-section the force resulting from vertical
and wind loads. Construction was perfectly organized; there were
apparently no fatal accidents during building. All the individual
components were prefabricated with the utmost precision,- only riveting
had to be performed on site: "There was no chisel, carving a form out of
stone, to be heard on this building site; here thought prevailed over
muscle-power, assigning the latter to secure scaffolding and cranes."
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EIFFEL.
What was needed for products of engineering to be accepted as
architecture was a structure that would capture the world's imagination
through its bold conception. The breakthrough came with the Eiffel
Tower, named after its designer, Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923).
As shown in a contemporary photograph (fig.
979), it was erected at the
entrance to the Paris World's Fair of 1889,
where it, too, served as a triumphal arch of
science and industry. It has become such a visual cliche beloved of
tourists—much like the
Statue of Liberty, which also involved Eiffel (see fig.
923)—that
we can hardly realize what a revolutionary impact it had at the time.
The tower, with its
frankly technological aesthetic, so dominates the city's skyline even
now that it provoked a storm of protest by the leading intellectuals of
the day. Eiffel used the same principles of structural engineering that
he had already applied successfully to bridges. Yet it is so novel in
appearance and so daring in construction that nothing like it has ever
been built, before or since.
The Eiffel Tower owed a good measure of its success to the fact that
for a small sum anyone could ascend its elevators to see a view of Paris
previously reserved for the privileged few able to afford hot-air
balloon rides (see fig.
941). It thus helped to define a
distinctive feature of modern architecture, one that it shares with
modern technology as a whole: it acts on large masses of people, without
regard to social or economic class. Although this capacity, shared only
by the largest churches and public buildings of the past, has also
served the aims of political extremists at both ends of the spectrum, modern architecture has
tended by its very nature to function as a vehicle of democracy. We can
readily understand, then, why the Eiffel Tower quickly became a popular
symbol of Paris itself. It could do so, however, precisely because it
serves no practical purpose whatsoever.

979.
Gustave Eiffel. The Eiffel
Tower. Paris. 1887-89
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Gustave Eiffel
Gustave Eiffel, in full Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel (born Dec.
15, 1832, Dijon, France—died Dec. 28, 1923, Paris), French
civil engineer renowned for the tower in Paris that bears
his name.
After graduation from the
College of Art and Manufacturing in 1855, Eiffel began to
specialize in metal construction, especially bridges. He
directed the erection of an iron bridge at Bordeaux in 1858,
followed by several others, and designed the lofty, arched
Gallery of Machines for the Paris Exhibition of 1867. In
1877 he bridged the Douro River at Oporto, Port., with a
525-foot (160-metre) steel arch, which he followed with an
even greater arch of the same type, the 540-foot (162-metre)
span Garabit viaduct over the Truyère River in southern
France, for many years the highest bridge in the world, 400
feet (120 m) over the stream. He was one of the first
engineers to employ compressed-air caissons in bridge
building. He designed the movable dome of the observatory at
Nice and the framework of the Statue of Liberty in New York
Harbor.
Eiffel startled the world
with the construction of the Eiffel Tower (1887–89), which
brought him the nickname “magician of iron.” It also
directed his interest to problems of aerodynamics, and he
used the tower for a number of experiments. At Auteuil,
outside Paris, he built the first aerodynamic laboratory,
where he continued to work throughout World War I; in 1921
he gave the laboratory to the state.
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Eiffel Tower
Eiffel Tower, French Tour Eiffel, Parisian landmark that is
also a technological masterpiece in building-construction
history. When the French government was organizing the
International Exposition of 1889 to celebrate the centenary
of the French Revolution, a competition was held for designs
for a suitable monument. More than 100 plans were submitted,
and the Centennial Committee accepted that of the noted
bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel. Eiffel’s concept of a
984-foot (300-metre) tower built almost entirely of
open-lattice wrought iron aroused amazement, skepticism, and
no little opposition on aesthetic grounds. When completed,
the tower served as the entrance gateway to the exposition.
Nothing remotely like the
Eiffel Tower had ever been built; it was twice as high as
the dome of St. Peter’s in Rome or the Great Pyramid of
Giza. In contrast to such older monuments, the tower was
erected in only about two years (1887–89), with a small
labour force, at slight cost. Making use of his advanced
knowledge of the behaviour of metal arch and metal truss
forms under loading, Eiffel designed a light, airy, but
strong structure that presaged a revolution in civil
engineering and architectural design. And, after it opened
to the public on March 31, 1889, it ultimately vindicated
itself aesthetically.
The Eiffel Tower stands on
four lattice-girder piers that taper inward and join to form
a single large vertical tower. As they curve inward, the
piers are connected to each other by networks of girders at
two levels that afford viewing platforms for tourists. By
contrast, the four semicircular arches at the tower’s base
are purely aesthetic elements that serve no structural
function. Because of their unique shape, which was dictated
partly by engineering considerations but also partly by
Eiffel’s artistic sense, the piers required elevators to
ascend on a curve; the glass-cage machines designed by the
Otis Elevator Company of the United States became one of the
principal features of the building, helping establish it as
one of the world’s premier tourist attractions.
The tower itself is 300
metres (984 feet) high. It rests on a base that is 5 metres
(17 feet) high, and a television antenna atop the tower
gives it a total elevation of 324 metres (1,063 feet). The
Eiffel Tower was the tallest man-made structure in the world
until the topping off of the Chrysler Building in New York
City in 1929.
Encyclopædia
Britannica
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1. Gustave Eiffel with Emile Nouguier and
Maurice Koechlin (eng.), Stephen Sauvestre
(arch.)
Eiffel Tower in Paris, 1889
2.
Drawing of the elevator installation
Gustave Eiffel (left) with his son-in-law and
colleague Adolphe Salles on the spiral staircase connecting the
uppermost platform with the tip of the tower.
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Eiffel Tower under construction in July 1888

Eiffel Tower; construction view in 1889 of the girders of the first
story

View of Eiffel Tower from the Montparnasse Tower

The Eiffel Tower as seen from the Champ de Mars
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