October 1955: millions of American children ran home from school to see the exciting new television program created by Walt Disney  - The Mickey Mouse Club.  They met a big smiling face man with a funny accent who introduced the “Tomorrow Land” segment of the program.  Wernher von Braun entered the lives of American children.  He told them wonderful stories about space travel in the future.  The children loved his stories.  The “Mouseketters” loved him.  All the children in America loved him.

 

              

 

 

Just 10 years before, Dr. von Bruan entered the lives of children in London and Antwerp where they huddled terrified in bomb shelters while thousands of the German V2 rockets were raining down on them killing tens of thousands of their parents, relatives and friends. The V2 rockets were designed and built by the Nazi party member, commissioned SS officer and future Mickey Mouse Club “Mouseketeer” - Wernher von Braun.

 

              Braun with SS Officers                    Braun's V2 taking off               Braun's V2 landing

 

After the war thousands of German military men were jailed and executed for war crimes against humanity.  Their defense, “I was just following orders”, was not only rejected but ridiculed as immoral.  However, “Mouseketeer” Warner was not tried; had he been, he could not plea, “I was just following orders.”  He was NOT following orders!  He was acting on his own initiative.  He wanted to build and launch V2 rockets. Dr. von Bruan devoted himself passionately to convincing Hitler to let him build them.

 

Thus, while thousands of German nationalists suffered the consequences of supporting the Nazis and the war, Werner was taken to White Sands New Mexico to build rockets for the Americans.  All was forgiven!  He was an engineer and he had value! 

 

Twenty years after Hitler embraced him at the Brown House Nazi headquarters and authorized him to build the V2 rockets, he was embraced by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy at the White House and authorized to build the Saturn V rocket that took Americans to the moon.

 

 

 In short, “Mouseketeer” Warner is an American hero.  Celebrated on the February 17, 1958 cover of Time Magazine as  “Missle Man” Van Braun. 

 

 

  

 

The mob celebrating at the Milan Esso gas station crowded to see the vicious, brutal, dehumanized lynching of Fascists - How dare anyone characterize Sicilians with Vendetta!   But, while the Milanese spat on and kicked the butchered Fascist carcasses, a brilliant engineer who readily applied his creativity to building air force and navel facilities for the Fascist military did not suffer so much as a disparaging word.

 

Again, “Just following orders” did not apply, for he willingly and aggressively entered into competitive bids with other design/construction companies for the opportunity to work for and profit from the Fascist.

  

 

 As with Braun, “all was forgiven”.  He was an engineer and he had value.  He was called upon to rebuild the devastation Italy suffered in a war the Fascist started and he materially supported and profited from.

 

The history of technology suggests that brilliant engineers are held to a different moral standard than mere soldiers and politicians.  Perhaps understandably so, for the adjective ‘mere’ does not apply to them.  Like the Mouse Club children, we are so awed by their creativity and capacity, and so desperately need their knowledge and skills, that we think of them in terms of Nietzsche’s Ubermenschen.

 

The purpose of this essay is to place in a European historical context the work of Milan’s brilliant darling.

 

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Showing slides of her visit to Notre Dame Cathedral, a high school history teacher admonished the student to sit up and pay attention. Slouched in a chair, bored to tears, he wondered: “What’s the big deal about a big church?

 

A few years later, now an advanced mason apprentice; he was slouched in a movie theater seat when scenes of the very same ‘big church’ came across the screen.  No one had to tell him to sit up and pay attention!

 

Bolting upright completely enthralled, he now saw the big church’s flying buttresses and ribbed vaulting through the ‘eyes of a mason’.

 

 

 Amazed, he wondered: 

“How do you get that much perfectly placed stone up in the air and keep it there.  In the thirteenth century besides”?

 

He went to the library looking for the answer.  However, virtually all the books about cathedrals were written from an aesthetic point of view; e.g. Gothic vs. Romanesque; stained glass, religious symbolism, etc. None of the ‘scholarly minds’ were the least bit interested in the construction question about how these incredible structures were built or the engineering question why they didn’t fall down?

 

Later, happening upon some pictures of the Doumo in Florence Italy; again, the mason’s eye saw amazing engineering and craftsmanship in this incredible brick structure.

 

 

And, again he found that the scholarly minds wrote books about aesthetics, religion, symbolism, etc; oblivious to the engineering genius and amazingly skilled bricklayers who built a structure millions of people travel from all over the world to see.

 

The young apprentice’s frustration with finding technical works about the great masonry structures was symptomatic of the late nineteenth century tripartite fracturing of the age-old Master Builder's model of architecture into the artist-architect, structural-engineer and construction-manager model.

 

 

Prior to the late nineteenth century, all aspects of building large-scale structures in Europe (and probable back to the ancient river civilization) were controlled by a single person.  John Harvey summed it up in his excellent book “The Master Builders”:

 

“The masters were responsible to plan and design suitable buildings that were: 
(a) aesthetically pleasing

(b) structurally stable and

(c) organize construction including provisions of great gangs of men and the acquisition and transport of vast quantities of materials.” (p. 20 emp.+)

 

In short, one person was the artist-architect, structural-engineer and construction-manger.  Is there any wonder why they were called “Master Builders”?

 

The quintessential paradigm of such a person was Filippo Brunelleschi the designer and master builder of the main dome for the Florentine Cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore. He was eloquently described on the cover of Ross King’s fantastic enthralling book Brunelleschi’s Dome:

 

“Brunelleschi was a Renaissance genius who bent men, material, and the very forces of nature to build an architectural wonder we continue to marvel at today...He engineered the perfect placement of brick and stone, built ingenious hoist and cranes (some among the most renowned machines of the Renaissance) to carry an estimate 70 million pounds hundreds of feet into the air, and designed the workers’ platforms and routines so carefully that only one man died during the decades of construction.”

 

Brunelleschi may have been the greatest of the Master Builders but his job description was not atypical.  Men with similar responsibilities built all the great Gothic cathedrals, and as recent as the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Christopher Wren served as the master builder of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral.

 

 

The origin of modern physics is generally thought of as beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth century.  During those centuries individual researchers like Galileo, Benedetto, etc. were doing the research that laid the empirical foundations of modern physics.  However, it was in the seventeenth century that the mathematics of Isaac Newton consolidated the work of all those divers scientists into a single discipline know as Newtonian Physics.

 

The technological application of Newtonian Laws of Physics gradually revolutionized virtually all types of industries. The application of those laws to architectural structures (i.e. architectural-engineering statics) brought the ‘master builder’ era to an end in the late nineteenth century.  At that time the age-old unity of architecture under the master builder fractured into three distinct and separate disciplines: artist-architect, structural-engineer and construction-manager.

 

There is a clear documentary trail of that architectural evolution, from master builder unity into this tripartite segregation, beginning with Newton’s contemporary Christopher Wern, the master builder of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

 

Wren was a classic example of a master builder.  He had full responsibility for the aesthetic style, structural components and construction of St. Paul’s (below).

 

 

 

 

Wren, if not THE Last, certainly was one of the last master builders in European culture, and his writings signaled the impending end of the master builder’s era; resulting from physics (statics) applied to the analysis of building structure.  The application of Newtonian physics in the form of ‘statics’ had not been developed in his day.  Accordingly, all his decisions about St. Paul’s were, in the tradition of master builders; based on tradition and intuition.  Nevertheless, acting the role of John the Baptist in architecture, he announced the coming of a new age.

 

In a masterful study of the history of technology and architecture Light, Wind, and Structure -The Mystery of the Master Builder, Robert Mark wrote:

 

“In several commentaries and in the fragmentary tracts, Wren asserted unambiguously that the science of statics must form the basis of building.  In 1713 Wren summed up his attitude...‘It is by due consideration of the Statick Principles...that Architecture depends.’  (p.165 emp+)

 

 

By the early nineteenth century, as Wern anticipated, intense debates began to develop about the role of engineering technology in architecture.  For example, Peter Collins in an excellent history of architecture Changing Ideals Modern Architecture, 1750-1950 writes:

 

“[In the early 1800s some] theorists perceived the error of assuming exact analogies between the mechanical arts and the fine arts...the fine arts did not obey cumulative laws of progress, like science and industry...[Others argued] architecture, unlike the other arts, is a science as well as an art...

 

“The first issue of the Revue Generale de l’Architecture [1840] announced that the editor’s intention was to demonstrate to architects and engineers the close correlation which existed between science and art.” (p.134 emp. +)

 

Collins’ observations indicate that the above mentioned mason apprentice would have found his search for material about the structural character of buildings more fruitful in the early nineteenth century.  He writes:

 

“It is a characteristic of the age that the architectural periodicals were not then fashion magazines, as they so often are today, but made it their policy simply to explore the application of new technological methods to architectural design...they were so much more concerned with disseminating scientific knowledge than with publicizing current buildings. (p. 134 emp.+)

 

The philosophical debates about the relation of architecture as art verses architecture as technology essentially ended in the last part of the nineteenth century with the invention of two new building materials never before uses in the history of architecture – steel and reinforced concrete.

 

The use of these materials demanded applied physics in the form of engineering statics.  It was impossible to determine the appropriate amount and configuration of these materials without Newtonian physics and mathematical analysis. Historic building traditions and the master builder’s intuitions were no longer applicable when it came to determining structural stability of buildings constructed with steel and reinforced concrete.

 

Accordingly, there was a need for a specialist for such analysis – the structural engineer.  Also, these new materials entailed new forms of construction techniques never before used. The notion of a master builder responsible for the aesthetic characteristics, the structural characteristics and the construction management was passé; each aspect entailed its respective specialist.

 

In sum, by the end of the nineteenth century three parties were responsible for the construction of a building: artist-architect, structural-engineer and construction-manager.

 

 

In the twentieth century the tripartite division of building large scale structures was well established in architectural education, journals and most importantly practice. For example, the Empire State Building built in 1931: the architectural design was by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon; the structural engineer H.G. Balcom and Associates; and, the general contractor Starrett Brothers and Eken.

 

However, during this same period there was one Italian architectural engineer who, like the mason apprentice, marveled at the structural ingenuity of the pre-modern buildings, the magnificent craftsmanship, and realized that aesthetic beauty could not be divorced from structural design and craftsmanship (i.e. construction) – Luigi Nervi.

 

In a biographical work "Aesthetics and Technology in Building" Nervi wrote:

 

“Toward the middle of the last century the era of technical intuition closed, and in its place came that of scientific technology. (p. 7)

 

“[However,] for several years I have tried to examine works of architecture of the past and of the present from the point of view both of the builder able to understand, evaluate, and appreciate the problems of the various methods of construction and of the non-technician who considers only the aesthetic aspect and wants to enjoy its beauty with the freedom of spirit with which one observes a work of art. (p. 2)

 

“This dual investigating has brought me to the conclusion...there does not exist, either in the past or in the present, a work of architecture which is accepted and recognized as excellent from the aesthetic point of view which is not also excellent from a technical point of view.  Good technology seems to be a necessary though not sufficient condition for good architecture (p. 2)

 

Nervi was not just a philosopher of architecture; he was a prodigious designer and builder.  He founded his own company to design and build structures all over the world.  He was a twentieth century Master Builder, a modern Brunelleschi,who designed the aesthetic and structural characteristics of the building and constructed the building using unique methods of construction of his own design.

 

He not only constructed an impressively large numbers of buildings all over the world; but the range of building types is equally impressive: residential, industrial, commercial, military; a Port Authority bus station in New York City, UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, Exhibition Hall in Caracas, etc.

 

 

While, he is of course famous and respected for his prodigious output of buildings of all sorts, to my mind one of the most important facets of his philosophy of architecture is how he speaks to ‘young apprentices.’

 

We live in a time when manual labor is looked upon as inferior to ‘the professions’.  A person with college degrees and professional certifications is thought to be from an intellectual and vocational point of view superior to the manual laborer – if not overtly explicit certainly tacitly.

 

However, Nervi appreciates the fact that genius aesthetic design and engineering is meaningless without masterful craftsmanship.  Of everything I have read about or by him the paragrah I love most is as follows:

 

“Every time I have visited a Gothic cathedral I have been unable to separate the feeling produced by the grandeur of the space from the enjoyment produced by the discovery of innumerable perfections of execution which express the humble love with which the work was carried out and which render even a simple masonry wall architecturally expressive.  We all have a tactile sense and subconscious appreciation of the physical qualities of the materials most commonly used, so that seeing them correctly used, according to their natures, influences the general impression produced by a work of architecture. (p. 3)

 

“Is it not indisputable that the work which we admire could not have existed had it not been for the beauty of the materials...[etc.]...and the love of those who built it...” (p. 6)

In short, no matter the genius of the architectural aesthetic and structural design, it counts for nothing without the craftsperson that renders the ideas into material form.  No one would have ever heard of Brunelleschi if it had not been for the masterful craftsmanship of the bricklayers who  built “Brunelleschi’s Dome”.  And, that rendering of artist and engineering ideas into material form can only be done by those highly trained and more importantly crafts persons who ‘love’ their work.

 

 

This respect for the manual worker is especially important for southern-Italian Americans to keep in mind.  For it is well documented in scientific census data that as a people we are not highly motivated to the universities and professions. Nevertheless, we must not forget that fa bella figura is at the heart of Italianita, and we bring forth that sense of “humble love” for beauty and perfection in construction, gas stations, machine shops, our gardens, cooking, music virtually everything we do as a people is a manifestation fa bella figura.  Others may brag about successes in academia, finance and politics.  But, if one looks for a way to characterize the southern-Italian American culture they should think in terms of perfectly laid bricks, a delicious sauce or a delightful garden - It don’t get better than that!