Bridges known worldwide as “American” astonished builders with rapid, low-cost construction that enabled industrializing nations to reorder the world.
The reimagining of construction sparked technological transformation. It allowed the spanning of great distances with smaller, simpler, replicable parts.
Transnational flows powered the creative surge. Participating were carpenters, contractors, enslaved Black people, engineers, laborers, manufacturers, politicians, and techno-utopians.
American Bridge’s narrative detox replaces fable with fact. It launches from a high-tech icon: the covered bridge.
Publisher: The MIT Press in association with The Lemelson Center, Smithsonian Institution
American Bridge features 170 photographs, drawings, and artworks.
Click on samples to enlarge.
REVIEWS
A landmark contribution to the history of technology—Dreicer exposes the ideological scaffolding behind one of America’s most iconic engineering structures. A masterful achievement. —Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, University of Wellington; author of Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City and Barbarian Architecture.
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Complex yet eminently readable, American Bridge challenges the reader to see infrastructure as essential to the narratives and imaginaries of the modern world. —Mark Jarzombek, MIT; author of A Global History of Architecture
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Challenging the concept of evolutionism in the history of construction, Dreicer’s in-depth study of the lattice bridge proposes a new approach based on innovation, entangling politics, and storytelling. —Bertrand Lemoine, historian/engineer/architect; author of The Eiffel Tower and Architecture in France
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Dreicer’s engrossing study of the lattice truss bridge makes a nuanced and original contribution to the history of technology. —John Ochsendorf, MIT; author of Guastavino Vaulting: The Art of Structural Tile
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The publication of American Bridge can be described as a sternstunde: a great moment in the history of construction. —Karl-Eugen Kurrer, historian/engineer; author of The History of the Theory of Structures
Nathaniel Jocelyn, Ithiel Town (1826) ©National Academy of Design, New York / Gift of George Dudley. Ithiel Town, who patented the lattice bridge, was a renowned innovator. He had a formative role in establishing how engineers and architects work today. Why has he been forgotten?
QUESTIONING THE STATUS QUO
Why are bridges with tons of iron called “wooden”?
Who developed the new way of building?
Where did skyscraper structural frames come from?”
What’s “American” and what isn’t?
These are a few of the questions American Bridge poses. By confronting the tales and categories that define common understandings of invention and design, American Bridge lays bare the narrative and technological infrastructures that support our thinking about almost everything.
American Bridge demonstrates the formative role of builders in devising fundamental industrial concepts, standard parts, and professional practices. It strips away myth in order to depict transnational inventor networks; consider the momentous rise and mysterious cancellation of designer Ithiel Town; make visible the participation of enslaved Black people at a defining moment of innovation; track the (re)invention of beam, truss, and high-rise frame.
FROM THE AUTHOR
As curatorial strategist, experience designer, and historian, I’ve developed exhibitions that engage audiences in understanding the world via unexpected approaches and multiples voices. My projects, whether about barn raisings, national borders, or fake news, sprang from my investigations into place, community, and technology. In American Bridge, I share this research. You can learn more about me here.
THANK YOU!
Warm thanks to the many individuals who assisted and advised me. I’d like to acknowledge the generous support of these institutions:
Cornell University
German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
Bourse Chateaubriand, Embassy of France
Deutsches Museum Library
Dibner Library Resident Scholar Program, Smithsonian Libraries
The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, Smithsonian Institution
Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund
