Peter Campbell writes:

Why aren’t there more famous civil engineers? Things are changing, but the credit for bridges, which are quintessentially the work of engineers, is still regularly given to the architects involved. Ove Arup, the Dane who founded the firm that still bears his name, is one 20th-century civil engineer whose name does have resonance. The firm now employs more than nine thousand staff in nearly forty countries. In his biography Peter Jones shows that Arup’s achievement was as much to do with human relations as with technical innovation. He was a catalyst for cultural change in his profession; his monument was the firm and its ethos. The financial arrangements of the partnership were essentially egalitarian. His education was unusual, too. He became an engineer only after he had decided he wasn’t quite good enough to make a career in philosophy. He didn’t stop reading philosophy, however; it made him a good critic of false connections between structure and aesthetics.

(LRB 5 April 2007)

Yale University Press | Hardback 352 pp. |ISBN: 9780300112962