Perhaps no twentieth-century engineer has left a more visible mark on a major city than has Othmar Ammann on New York. His five major bridges there bear much of the enormous traffic flow to and from the city while requiring remarkably little maintenance. They are beautiful and efficient structures, for Ammann achieved an uncommon harmony of visual elegance, simplicity, and power with practical design. But that harmony developed slowly. From the powerful early arch at Hell Gate and the later world-famous George Washington Bridge to his ultimate achievement, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, across the entrance to New York Harbor, Ammann showed the way to a new approach to bridge architecture—an approach based on the idea that an unornamented, inexpensive solution can be in all respects the best solution. Civil engineers speak of Ammann with a certain reverence in this regard, for he almost singlehandedly led the way to this aesthetic.

Before the work of Ammann and his contemporaries, engineers paid little direct attention to the artistic possibilities inherent in construction. Instead they kept largely to themselves, producing designs that were sometimes passed along to architects for “ornamentation.” A few engineers—Thomas Telford in England, John Augustus Roebling in the United States—managed to design bridges that were at once beautiful and structurally expressive. But they were normally built at least partially of stone, and the aesthetic of masonry construction is thousands of years old. Roebling’s and Telford’s aesthetic approaches to their construction materials were hardly new.

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