OCTOBER 2007 » book review

Function And Form

Lighthouses
by Sara E. Wermiel
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, NY; 2006
358 pp.; clothbound; 600 b/w illus. with CD-ROM; $75
ISBN 978-0-393-73166-8

Bridges
by Richard L. Cleary
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, NY; 2007
383 pp.; clothbound; 952 b/w illus. with CD-ROM; $75
ISBN 978-0-393-73136-1

Reviewed by Will Holloway

Cape Hatteras Light, a conical brick lighthouse on North Carolina's Hatteras Island, rises 207 ft. from foundation to roof spire, making the 1870 black-and-white spiral-striped structure the tallest lighthouse in the United States. Gurnet Point Lighthouse, built in Plymouth, MA, in 1843 to replace a Colonial-era structure, is the country's oldest surviving wooden lighthouse. North America's first known lighthouse was a 65-ft.-tall masonry tower built on Little Brewster Island in 1716 at the entrance to Boston Harbor. The Point Arena Lighthouse (1908) in California, the U.S.'s first reinforced-concrete lighthouse, was built to replace a lighthouse destroyed by the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

These and other facts and figures are presented in Sara Wermiel's Lighthouses, the fourth title in the Norton/Library of Congress Visual Sourcebooks in Architecture, Design & Engineering series. Drawing on the Library of Congress' vast collection of historic photographs, drawings, maps and prints, the series is meant to pique readers' interest in structures – including barns, bridges, theaters and canals – that provide unique insights into the history and development of architecture and engineering in the U.S., and, in so doing, foster their preservation.

The introduction, entitled "Building America's Lighthouses," details the development of the modern lighthouse, from the first 17th-century towers in Great Britain to the recent type known as the Texas Tower, so called because of its resemblance to the offshore oil-drilling platforms along the Texas coast. "Essentially a tower supporting a light that can be seen from a distance, intended to orient mariners and warn them of hazards," as Wermiel writes, the lighthouse has fulfilled a role difficult to comprehend in today's planes-trains-and-automobiles era:

…from the eighteenth century through the first part of the twentieth century, coinciding with the period of lighthouse construction, water transport was for a time the main – and later, along with railroads, the most important – means of long-distance transport for both people and goods. Ports swarmed with vessels of all types, from small ferries and boats plying the coasts and rivers to large ocean-going and military ships. Cars, buses, trains, and airplanes have largely superseded ferries and ocean-liners for transporting people. Technological innovations have greatly reduced the ranks of longshoremen. The once bustling docks in many port towns are now long gone. Historic images suggest how active ports once were and, consequently, the importance of lighthouses at this time.

The book is broken into seven amply illustrated sections, chronologically detailing lighthouse construction types. The first section focuses on load-bearing-masonry towers built between 1764 and 1852, such as the 103-ft.-tall Sandy Hook Lighthouse in New Jersey, which was completed in 1764 and marks the entrance to New York Harbor; the Sabine Pass Lighthouse (1857) in Louisiana, an unusual brick-and-concrete-buttressed 75-ft.-tall structure that looks a bit like a space shuttle; and a number of the lighthouses that dot the coast of Maine – many illustrated with modern images from photographer Richard Cheek.

Stone and brick towers from 1853 to 1905 compose the second section, including Cape Hatteras Light. Here, as with the rest of the book, commentary is minimal – certainly the strongest aspect of Lighthouses are the 600 illustrations culled from the Library of Congress' collection (like all the books in the series, Lighthouses includes a companion CD-ROM with downloadable versions of all illustrations). The eight images of Cape Hatteras Light include detail shots of the iron stairway and the roof of and the railing around the lantern room. Drawings include an historical vertical section and modern elevations, sections and floor plans.

The remaining chapters cover cottage-style lighthouses, cast-iron-plate and skeleton towers, lighthouses on marine foundations and 20th-century construction types. Highlights include the cast-iron-plate Portland Breakwater Lighthouse (1875) in South Portland, ME, which was modeled on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, Greece; the skeletal Ship Shoal Lighthouse (1859), which has eight legs arranged in a 40-ft.-dia. circle and projects some 125 ft. above the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast; and Jeffrey's Hook Lighthouse (1880; moved to current location in 1921) in New York City. Best known as the Little Red Lighthouse, Jeffery's Hook Lighthouse rises 40 ft. next to the easternmost steel tower of the George Washington Bridge – one of the hundreds of structures presented in another title in the Norton/Library of Congress Visual Sourcebooks series, author Richard Cleary's Bridges.

The George Washington Bridge, a looming steel frame with a 3,500-ft.-long span, was constructed according to the plans of a design team that included architect Cass Gilbert, who is most famous for the United States Custom House and Woolworth Building in New York City and the Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC. As Cleary – an associate professor at the University of Texas School of Architecture – explains, the bare steel frame of the George Washington Bridge is representative of a change in attitude brought on by the Modern movement:

The masonry cladding Cass Gilbert designed for the steel towers of the George Washington Bridge (1923-1931) in New York City was not executed for financial reasons, but the omission was viewed positively by some who felt that covering the steel structure was dishonest and out of step with the spirit of modernity. Indeed, by the 1930s, the question of what expertise architects could bring to bridge design had considerably more complicated then it had been earlier in the century when their task was understood as beautifying structures according to the widely accepted principles and forms of classical art. In contrast, modernist doctrines of good design variously called for forms that would be uniquely expressive of a new age, informed by the rational thinking of science and engineering, and based on concepts that eliminated distinctions between form and structure.

Of course, that "rational thinking of science and engineering" sometimes produced less than perfect results, as was demonstrated by the dramatic collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Tacoma, WA, in 1940. Four months after it opened, "Galloping Gertie" was torn apart by wind-induced oscillations, the victim of the prevailing "deflection theory" – essentially that the longer a bridge was, the more flexible it could be. As Cleary writes, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge "was rebuilt with deeper, stiffer trusses, and the decks of other bridges designed according to deflection theory, such as the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge in New York City, were reinforced similarly."

Leon Moisseiff, the lead engineer of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, also worked on other less infamous spans, including the Manhattan Bridge (1901-1909) in New York City and the Golden Gate Bridge (1933-1937) in San Francisco, which are both presented in chapter five, "Suspension and Cable-Stayed Bridges." This section also includes historic lithographs and wood engravings and numerous modern detail photographs of the John A. Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge (1869-1883).

Preceding chapters cover beam, arch, truss and movable bridges. The introduction, "Bridge Building in America," details the emergence and development of bridge construction. Like Lighthouses, Bridges is in many ways a history of transportation in the U.S. – as lighthouses were crucial to the country's maritime commerce, bridges represent the country's continued growth as trains and later automobiles became the predominant modes of transportation. As Cleary writes:

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the rapidly increasing numbers of shippers and travelers dependent on reliable transportation networks became less tolerant of delays at ferry crossings of rivers once considered beyond the capabilities of bridge builders. Designers responded by developing economical structural systems (including the suspension bridge), materials, and methods of assembly that made it possible to span longer distances and to build intermediate piers in deep river channels.

Many of these early bridges stand today, artifacts of another era that still serve their original purpose. A cast-iron, 80-ft. arch designed by Richard Delafield in 1836 still spans Dunlap's Creek in Brownsville, PA. Calvert Vaux' iron and steel Bow Bridge still graces Central Park in New York City. (For more on Central Park bridges, see "Photographic Survey," page 160.) The country's first reinforced-concrete bridge, the 20-ft.-span Alvord Lake Bridge (1889) still stands in San Francisco.

All are presented in Bridges, another example that the as-of-now published titles in the Norton/Library of Congress Visual Sourcebooks series are a must have for architectural history buffs and barn, theater, canal, lighthouse and bridge enthusiasts alike. TB

«BACK TO OCTOBER 2007 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Have something to say about this article? Feel free to comment!

Comments feed