10 engineers who made architectural history

The name of the French engineer and entrepreneur Gustave Eiffel is closely linked to that of the homonymous Parisian tower. The work, built for the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1889, was intended not only a celebration of France but also a highlight of the constructive possibilities offered by steel, which was experiencing a wide diffusion at the time. The construction of the tower, impossible without such new technologies, was completed in just three years (from 1886 to 1889). The sinuous and elegant shape did not derive from aesthetic considerations but from a detailed calculation to counteract the force of the wind.

The Russian engineer was a pioneer in the use of structural steel. His works include the world-famous Šuchov Tower for radio broadcasting in the Moscow suburb of Šabolovka, built in less than two years (between 1920 and 1922). The structure, a steel lattice in the shape of a rotating hyperboloid, consisted of 6 stacked elements, assembled on the ground inside the tower and then lifted into position, one on top of the other, according to a telescopic assembling system that gave stability to the lightweight structure and reduced its tendency to deform. The tower served as a broadcasting station until 2002 and is now awaiting restoration.

Loyal to reinforced concrete (Nikolaus Pevsner called him “the most ingenious concrete modeler of our time”), Nervi was an all-round intellectual (engineer, architect, builder, writer, university lecturer, inventor). His realizations, based on bold technical-structural solutions, achieve extraordinary elegant results, through a balance between calculation and poetics. He was also responsible for profound innovations in construction processes: from the invention of ferrocement (in 1943) to the “Nervi system”, a series of technical solutions defining a new way of building (economical, rapid and, well ahead of its time, sustainable, thanks to the control of costs, times and building site waste).

An English engineer of Danish origin, Ove Arup was the founder of the Arup Group Limited (1946), an engineering, design, planning and construction company now active worldwide. A firm believer in “total design”, as an integrated practice of architecture and engineering, he was the “shadow-engineer” who made possible the realization of several iconic works in the history of architecture: from small masterpieces, such as the London Zoo's penguin tank with its double concrete spiral (Berthold Lubetkin, 1934), to the landmarks of the Sydney Opera House (Jørn Utzon, 1973) and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, 1977).

Architect and man of calculation, Fèlix Candela, like the great work masters of the past, synthesized in his professional role that of architect, engineer and builder, becoming a reference for many contemporary designers including Santiago Calatrava. Through the use of reinforced concrete, which he knew how to push to the utmost expressive results, his work is characterized by the conception of complex structures, masterfully left exposed, counterbalanced by slender reinforced concrete roofs, which give an ethereal and light character to even huge buildings. An illustrious example is the Los Manantiales Restaurant in Mexico City, composed of four hyperbolic parabolas intersecting to compose a dramatic space: a structure reproposed by Candela forty years later in L' Oceanográfic in Valencia (with Calatrava). 

Among the variety of works he realized (all in Uruguay: from industrial sheds to grain silos, from markets to churches), Dieste developed a language strongly characterized by the use of brick. Particularly innovative were the use of the Gaussian vault (a brick shell roof structure, whose stability is guaranteed by a double-curved arch that is particularly resistant to peak loads, and cheap compared to reinforced concrete) and bricks reinforced with steel bars and cement (which he renamed “reinforced ceramics” laid on mobile formwork to achieve the desired shape). A fine example is the Cristo Obrero Church in Atlántida (1959), declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021.

A “modern” engineer, Zorzi made affordability the key feature of his work, freeing it from purely utilitarian connotations and instead codifying a lexicon in which the material and formal reduction and the rationality of calculation allow for a balance between Utilitas and Venustas. In the 1960s he was one of the first in Italy to tackle the cantilevered construction system in the design of bridges and viaducts; in industrial, maritime and plant engineering he sought typological solutions through the use of industrially produced construction components. The steel bridge over the Sfalassà torrent on the A3 Salerno-Reggio Calabria motorway is renowned as one of the largest in the world for its type.

A true pioneer of sound research, the engineer-musician of Franco-Greek origin was also an assistant to Le Corbusier, with whom he realised the Philips Pavilion at the Expo in Brussels (1958). Xenakis gave concrete form to Le Corbusier's idea of a pavilion composed of suspended shells and undulating vaults: between sketches and annotations on hyperbolic conoids and paraboloids, and scale models to assess deformations and simulate the behaviour of the building during installation, Xenakis arrived to the final solution by adopting thin self-supporting shells. Inside, a 10-minute installation conceived by Le Corbusier (“Le poème électronique”, a combination of lights, projections and music composed by Edgard Varèse and by Xenakis himself) celebrated the new electronic age.

As Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi states, with Musmeci the process in structural design is reversed: if before him one would start from a predetermined form to be verified through the unknown calculation of forces, with Musmeci it is the tensions that are imposed, from which the form of the building springs accordingly. The result is an expression of pure elegance and constructive “minimum” that, avoiding formal exhibits, rather pursues a structural efficiency as close as possible to the rules of Nature. A famous example is the viaduct over the river Basento (Potenza), whose complex structure with an organic feel resembles a status of infrastructural artwork.

Architect, engineer and sculptor, Santiago Calatrava is considered one of the major contemporary heirs of the formalist-structuralist approach pioneered by Félix Candela and Pier Luigi Nervi. A designer who derives the built shape from the system of forces and tensions that pervade it, on the one hand, and from an imagery strongly inspired by nature, on the other, with the result of a highly recognizable and powerfully dramatic architecture-sculpture that contradicts the statics of the masses through dynamic and plastic configurations.