The Art of Structure

As architecture blossoms out in billowing forms of reinforced concrete, many a modern architect is turning back to study the work of the handful of pioneers who blazed the way for modern shell structures. One of the foremost and least known is Engineer Eduardo Torroja y Miret, 59. A short (5 ft. 4 1/2 in.), bald-domed Spaniard, Torroja was throwing wafer-thin slabs of concrete up into space as early as 1933. His race-track stands, soccer stadiums, marketplaces, churches and aqueducts are only now getting the recognition they deserve as ancestors of some of today's most spectacular engineering feats.

Torroja (pronounced toe-roe-ha) has long been recognized within a narrow professional circle as a creative engineer whose breathtaking structures are rivaled in Europe only by those of Italy's Pier Luigi Nervi. Even the late Frank Lloyd Wright doffed his porkpie in salute, said, "He has expressed the principles of organic construction better than any engineer I know."

Trial by Fire. What has kept Torroja largely unknown is that most of his work is to be seen only in Spain. But the very fact that Spain is woefully short on steel supplied the driving force behind Torroja's exploration of concrete as a material that could be both cheap and strong. The son of a Catalan mathematics professor, Torroja trained as an engineer at Madrid University, then worked for five years as a contractor before finally deciding that "the structure of concrete cannot be figured mathematically--it is much stronger than the mathematician can prove, and you can't wait for the mathematician. You have to go ahead and try what you know by intuition." To prove his theory of intuition, he founded his own Technical Institute of Construction and Cement, kept it going on a shoestring.

The payoff for Torroja came when he began to receive commissions for structures few engineers would then have cared to tackle. As early as 1933 he had covered the marketplace at Algeciras with a 156-ft. spherical dome, a shelter still ranked as a classic of shell construction. The next year he evolved a scheme for the Madrid Hippodrome, in which a series of soaring shell roofs (see color) were so delicately cantilevered that a thin, vertical tie rod behind the stands was all that was needed to keep them in equilibrium. In Spain's Civil War, the Hippodrome was subjected to trial by fire--it was shelled and took 26 hits. But Torroja's structure survived, bedraggled but still sound.

Virtue in Curves. For Torroja, the beauty of structure grows out of the mathematical laws that express the flow of stresses and tensions. "For the first time in the history of art," says Torroja, "the structure has acquired an independent personality, so that its own intimate esthetic quality can be appreciated."

Torroja pioneered new techniques to build Europe's second longest concrete arch (a 690-ft. span) to bridge the Esla River at Zamora, Spain. His gull-wing roof over Las Corts soccer stadium in Barcelona is one of the world's most breathtaking architectural sights. Even in the small churches and shrines that Torroja has built for Pyrenees villages, he has exploited shell structure to produce new forms whose strength comes from shape and whose beauty springs from mathematical curves possible only in modern reinforced concrete. Torroja is fond of walking his institute visitors under the sickle-shaped ribs of the pergola that spring from the outside wall and curve elegantly overhead like jets of water frozen in a high wind, explaining with professional pride that they are actually "Bernoullian lemniscates* with zero end curvature." Says Torroja, "Every mathematical curve has a nature of its own, the accuracy of a law, the expression of an idea, the evidence of a virtue."

The best is yet to come, Torroja argues. As engineers work their way intuitively into the art of structure, Torroja is certain that a whole new vocabulary of beauty and function will be discovered and put at the service of architecture, giving it a personality and variety such as the world has never before known.

* Derived by Swiss Mathematician Jakob Bernoulli (1654-1705), from the equation (x^2+y^2)^2 = a^2(x^2-y^2).

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