If you read the wikipedia article linked in yesterday’s blog post, you may have seen an interesting detail: George Post‘s academic career ended with a degree in civil engineering. It’s not that odd: since academic training in engineering and architecture first became available in the US, there have been people with engineering degrees working as architects and people with architecture degrees working as engineers. This only became difficult with the rise of professional licensure, but even now there are ways for people to switch paths if they choose. Post’s more famous near-contemporary, William Le Baron Jenney, was another architect mostly trained in engineering.
When Post and Jenney began their careers, there was no such thing in the US as a structural engineer whose career was spent working on buildings. Engineers worked on railroads, canals, bridges, and other civil works. They also worked on specialized buildings, like the train sheds of large stations. In other words, my profession did not exist yet. The introduction of analytically-designed, industrially-produced elements into buildings, starting with cast-iron columns and wrought-iron beams, was the beginning of the change. Designing these elements (and the more complicated frames that people gradually made using them) required training that was not part of an ordinary architect’s background but was well within that of an engineer.
Ultimately, it was easier for everyone involved for some structural engineers to learn their way around ordinary buildings than for some architects to learn structural design. This marks the beginning of the permanent split between architecture and civil engineering and the beginning of the looser split between bridge engineers and building engineers. The splits are obviously ones of professional specialty, as the work of all groups intersects on various projects. After Post’s generation was gone, people who have been the lead designer for both structure and architecture have been quite rare.
Post’s Havemeyer Building, seen above, showed off his skill in adapting traditional facades to high-rises (far more so than his awkward St. Paul Building) but was also his first complete braced frame. He had been using long-span roofs since the Troy Music Hall and had been working towards complete metal frames for twenty years when he designed Havemeyer.
