Art in Iron and Steel - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 3

bridge in its full glory and in its context, showing the iron structure not as a blight on the landscape
but at the center of it. The surrounding area at the same time radiates out from the bridge and pales
behind it.
In the nineteenth century, the railroads captured the imagination of artists, and the steam engine
in the distance of a landscape became as much a part of it as the herd of cows in the foreground. The
Impressionist Claude Monet painted man-made structures like railway stations (Gare Saint-Lazare)
and cathedrals (Rouen) as well as water lilies. Portrait painters such as Christian Schussele found
subjects in engineers and inventors—and their inventions—as well as in the American founding
fathers. By the twentieth century, engineering, technology, and industry were very well established
as subjects for artists.
American-born Joseph Pennell illustrated many European travel articles and topics, includ-
ing—among the many with his wife, Elizabeth Robins Pennell —Over the Alps on a Bicycle. Pen-
nell, who early in his career made drawings of buildings under construction and shrouded in scaf-
folding, returned to America late in life and recorded industrial activities during World War I. He is
perhaps best known among engineers for his depiction of the Panama Canal as it neared completion
and his etchings of the partially completed Hell Gate and Delaware River bridges.
Pennell has often been quoted as saying, “Great engineering is great art,” a sentiment that he
expressed repeatedly. He wrote of his contemporaries, “I understand nothing of engineering, but I
know that engineers are the greatest architects and the most pictorial builders since the Greeks.”
Where some observers saw only utility, Pennell saw also beauty, if not in form then at least in scale.
He felt he was not only rendering a concrete subject but also conveying through his drawings the
impression that it made on him. Pennell called the sensation that he felt before a great construction
project “The Wonder of Work.” He saw engineering as a process. That process is memorialized in
every completed dam, skyscraper, bridge, or other great achievement of engineering.
If Pennell experienced the wonder of work in the aggregate, Lewis Hine focused on the individu-
als who engaged in the work. Hine was trained as a sociologist but became best known as a photo-
grapher who exposed the exploitation of children. His early work documented immigrants passing
through Ellis Island, along with the conditions in the New York tenements where they lived and
the sweatshops where they worked. His depictions of child labor in the Carolinas brought to pub-
lic attention how young children toiled for long hours amid dangerous machinery. Hine depicted
American Red Cross relief efforts during World War I and, afterward, the burdens war placed on
children. Upon returning to New York, he was given the opportunity to record the construction of
the Empire State Building, which resulted in the striking photographs that have become such famil-
iar images of daring and insouciance. He put his own life at risk to capture workers suspended on
cables hundreds of feet in the air and sitting on a high girder eating lunch. To engineers today, one
of the most striking features of these photos, published in 1932 in Men at Work, is the absence of
safety lines and hard hats. However, perhaps more than anything, the photos evoke Pennell's “won-
der of work” and inspire admiration for the bravery and skill that bring a great engineering project
to completion.
Alfred Stieglitz, who intended to study engineering at Berlin Polytechnic, redirected his interests
to photochemistry after he acquired a small camera, and while still a student he began to work to