- Hello, everyone, and welcome back.
And guess where we are?
Do you recognize the bridge?
If you do recognize the bridge,
do you know who designed the bridge?
This is the George Washington Bridge, and as you might have
guessed by today's lecture, the title, Ammann is the one
who designed this bridge.
He actually designed many bridges around
the New York City area, and many people say
that he stitched New York City together.
For example, he not only designed
the George Washington Bridge, but the Bayonne Bridge,
the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge,
the Throgs Neck Bridge, and several others
in the New York City area.
So you recognize his bridges, especially if you live
in New York City or have lived in New York City,
but many people don't know the man, Othmar Ammann,
nor the story behind the designs of his bridges.
So in today's lecture, we're going to focus specifically
on three bridges and touch upon a fourth.
So we're gonna look at in detail the Bayonne Bridge,
and the George Washington Bridge,
and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge,
and we're gonna touch upon the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge,
all bridges designed by Othmar Ammann.
For today's lecture, one goal is gonna be to look at
Othmar Ammann and who were the greatest people
that influenced him in his life,
who were his greatest mentors.
So we're gonna look at two people in particular
who influenced Ammann.
Next, we're gonna do a comparative critical analysis
using the Bayonne Bridge and compare it to an earlier
design by Ammann and one of his colleagues.
Next, we're gonna look at the George Washington Bridge,
we're gonna look at the scientific, social,
and symbolic aspects of this bridge,
and following the George Washington Bridge
there was a new trend in bridge design
and this trend was about thin decks
and we're gonna look to see what effect
this trend of thin decks had in particular on the dynamic
effects of wind, these dynamic effects that the wind had
on long, thin suspension bridges.
And finally, we're gonna end the lecture looking at
the scientific, social, and symbolic aspects
of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
So I will mention two people who are great people
who influenced Ammann and were great mentors to him.
One was a teacher, Wilhelm Ritter,
who taught at the ETH in Zurich,
where Othmar Ammann went to the university.
And Ritter was a special teacher because he taught not only
the hard-core technical aspects of engineering,
but he also taught about the aesthetics.
So inside of this teaching of the technical
were comments related to the aesthetics
that forced, or at least started to have the students
consider about aesthetic considerations of their designs.
Ritter came to the US before he was teaching
to study the bridges of the US,
and he wrote a book about that.
So in this book, for example, was a bridge called
the Washington Bridge, this is not
the George Washington Bridge, this is
the Washington Bridge over the Harlem River,
not too far from where we are right now.
So there's a sketch of that in the book,
and also sketches about details,
so he taught about the importance of details.
Most of the major bridge failures are failures
of the connection details, so the details
are super important in any design that anyone makes.
But he also, as I mentioned, taught about the aesthetics.
So he wrote about a bridge that, quote,
"Has no aesthetic sense," so he was teaching about
the aesthetics and the consideration of aesthetics
in his designs, or in designs of bridges,
and these are ideas that Othmar Ammann was learning
while in the classroom with Wilhelm Ritter,
and we're gonna talk about Wilhelm Ritter again later on
when we talk about Robert Maillart,
a great designer of concrete bridges.
The last page in the book, of Ritter's book on the bridges
of the US, was a proposal to cross the Hudson River.
The Hudson River is right behind me,
it's on the west side of Manhattan
and it's the river in between Manhattan and New Jersey.
So this is a proposal that was put forward by a man named
Gustav Lindenthal, and in the proposal,
the span was on the order of, say, 3,000 feet
and that's a tremendous span for any bridge at that time.
But this was in the book, and these ideas
were inspiring Ammann.