Six Bridges : The Legacy of Othmar H. Ammann

Ammann was born and educated in Switzerland, emigrated to New York in 1904, and hit his professional stride at a time when the City desperately needed a series of arterial bridges to knit together its boroughs and to connect them with neighboring states.This is the first book to examine Ammann's life and work; it is also a summary account of the technology embodied in the long-span bridges and the role they played in regional planning initiatives undertaken in the Tri-State area between the 1920s and the 1960s. Ammann was also the designer of many other projects, including the Lincoln Tunnel, the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and a bridge across Lake Geneva that was never built. He is often mistaken as the designer/engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge, and perhaps would have been if he hadn't lacked an engineering license for California.

"It is a crime to build an ugly bridge," said Othmar Ammann, and the first span he built as an independent engineer, New York's George Washington Bridge, was among the elegant bridges recounted in Henry Petroski's fine Engineers of Dreams (1995). This handsome album summarizes Ammann's career and exhibits 200 photographs and design drawings of his principal achievements: the GW Bridge, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the Throgs Neck Bridge, the Triborough Bridge, the Bayonne Bridge, and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Rastorfer's text provides the political context (especially the muscle of public works czar Robert Moses) surrounding the creation of these distinctive elements of New York's skyline, but Rastorfer is more enthused about Ammann's management of these bridges' construction and his contribution to their unique engineering elements and overall aesthetic. The black-and-white images exalt the artistic aspects of the bridges, proclaiming their beauty and vitality to the life of the city, while commemorating their immigrant Swiss designer. Gilbert Taylor