PROFESSOR BILLINGTON
TEACHING

While teaching engineering in the early 1960s, Professor David Billington found that his architecture students were exceptionally bored. They wanted to learn about beautiful structures, not just abstract engineering principles. This request began an odyssey that led to the creation of his pioneering approach to the study of engineering, which integrates an interest in aesthetics. In 1974, he inaugurated the extremely popular course “CEE 262: Structures and the Urban Environment,” which emphasizes the art of structural design. Professor Billington defines structural art as a new, post-Industrial Revolution art form, parallel to but independent of architecture. Its guiding principles are efficiency, economy, and elegance. The engineers represented in this project and in the course, Robert Maillart, Othmar H. Ammann, Heinz Isler, and Christian Menn, illustrate his dictum that the very best engineers prove to be the greatest structural artists.

The creation of the course required the development of an innovative approach to engineering pedagogy and scholarship. Professor Billington and his colleague Robert Mark borrowed the methods of the traditional art history slide lecture and applied them to their teaching. Students learn engineering concepts through the study of beautiful works of structural art. The Princeton University Art Museum also supported a series of exhibitions, beginning in 1972 with a show dedicated to Maillart and culminating this spring in “The Art of Structural Design.” Professor Billington published two books to serve as texts for the course, Robert Maillart’s Bridges in 1979 and The Tower and the Bridge in 1983.




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© 2003 The Princeton University Art Museum