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Obituary by John F. Abel and Maria E. Moreyra Garlock:
The global structural engineering community lost an outstanding advocate for creative structural design with the death of David P. Billington. However, his legacy survives through both his writings and his many colleagues and former students whose ideas, practice, scholarship and teaching have been indelibly influenced by this remarkable colleague and mentor.
During his 50 years as a professor at Princeton University, Billington continually enlarged the scope of his teaching and scholarship and became legendary within the university and widely respected internationally. He started with a focus on concrete structures, especially thin shells, and successively engaged in a growing diversity of humanistic studies such as art, history, politics, economics and the contributions of engineering to contemporary culture. Particularly notable was his
demonstration in his book, The Tower and the Bridge (1983), that creative structural designers should be considered artists; indeed, the subtitle of this book is The New Art of Structural Engineering. Readers and students became familiar with his tripartite alliterative aphorism that structural design should be “efficient, economic and elegant.” In an approach atypical of engineers, he extended his ideas to laypeople not only by his writings, courses and public lectures but also by developing multiple art exhibitions that traveled widely.
After graduating from Princeton in 1950 with a degree in basic engineering, Billington received his first exposure to civil structural engineering through a two-year Fulbright scholarship in Ghent, Belgium with Prof. Gustave Magnel, a pioneer in prestressed concrete. Thereafter, he entered structural design practice in New York City with Roberts & Schaefer Co., where one of his valued mentors was Anton Tedesko who was widely acknowledged as having introduced concrete thin shells in the U.S. (and who was named an IASS Honorary Member in 1979).
In 1960, after having delivered occasional lectures at Princeton, Billington was invited to join the civil engineering faculty to teach structural engineering. He embarked on research with several graduate students, including studying thin-shell behavior by means of micro-concrete models. In 1965, he published the textbook Thin Shell Concrete Structures, which became the leading English-language design reference in this area over the next decades – and was followed by a significantly transformed edition in 1982. This transformation, which included more historical background, more photographs of actual shells and an introduction to structural art, is indicative of Billington’s expanded philosophy and approach that was born from seminal teaching experiences of the late 1960s.
It was the challenge of teaching graduate structural engineering courses for Princeton architecture students that provided the stimulus for Billington to dramatically enlarge the focus of his teaching, writing and research. Specifically, the architecture students vociferously asked why structures should be taught with stick figures of hypothetical structures rather than with real examples, especially aesthetically pleasing ones. As examples, they pointed out the concrete bridges of the Swiss engineer Robert Maillart that were featured in the book by Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture. This spark ignited Billington’s long-lasting interest in Maillart that encompassed some of his books and exhibitions and that culminated with a definitive biography, Robert Maillart: Builder, Designer, Artist (1997). . . . .
[For more see the link, Prof. David P. Billington (1927-2018)]
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