DB: The Verrazano Bridge does, in fact, historically note the end of American industrial dominance. That is to say, right after that bridge, New York loses its position as the world's dominant port and shortly thereafter, with the rise of industry in West Germany and in Japan, it becomes clear that the U.S. is no longer the dominant nation that it once was, that it was in fact bracketed by the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the completion of the Verrazano Bridge. That doesn't mean, of course, that it's necessary to imagine that we now go into a state of decline. What it does mean is that the challenge for us has shifted. It has shifted from continuous building to maintaining. We have reached middle age, when we must maintain what we've got. And I don't believe completely in this biological analogy because middle age has no definition of time for us, you know, as a society as it does for us individually. But we have reached that and it is time now that we think about rehabilitation and the continuing use of the resources that we have and have built.

This is the meaning of what's going on in the East River today. The rebuilding, in effect, of those great bridges there, from the Brooklyn Bridge, the Williamsburg, the Manhattan and so forth. And we have found, to our surprise and to the surprise of many observers, that we can't build them again. We can't tear them down and rebuild them, that we must maintain them and maintain them while the traffic is still running, as the Port Authority has so beautifully done with the George Washington Bridge itself, to maintain traffic as it added the second deck, as it rehabilitates parts of it and so forth. So we're gradually learning this and the culture had to learn that in doing this, this is as creative a venture as building things new. It is a creative effort, or a re-creative effort in a sense, to build upon what others have done now in place, rather than always new.

Now the question is, are there new bridge possibilities? Are there brand new possibilities? And, of course, there are. There's a whole new set of forms. The cable-stayed bridge came in after World War II. And as an image of the lack of dominance of the United States, when these began to come into the world picture in the '60s, because we had lost that sense of dominance, these bridges did not flourish here. And, indeed, when they began to flourish here we had to go to Europe to get the designers for them, or at least collaboratively. And so the challenge there is not so much now with the longest-spanning bridges in the world, but with those medium-span bridges, bridges of 1,000, 1,500, 2,000 feet in span, of which there are many to be built. The challenge now for us is to think, in terms of our own culture, how we build those bridges and how we can build them to be not the longest-spanning bridge in the world, but examples of exemplary bridge art in which they are economical, in which they perform well, and in which they are a pleasure to see on the landscape.

DB: My favorite American bridge, without much thought behind it, is clearly Brooklyn Bridge. And that's a very standard answer, but I give it because of its meaning for our culture, because of its technical importance, of its ambiguity, of its political context and, above all, of the epic of its design, on the one hand, in the life of John Roebling, and its building in the life of Washington Roebling. There are two other bridges that are important to, to bracket that. The George Washington Bridge is, I believe, the most important 20th century bridge because of its scale and because of all the problems that it raised, both engineering and esthetic. But, above all, my favorite bridge is the Salginatobel Bridge of Robert Maillart in Switzerland. And this is connected to Ammann because it brings us to the fact that Ammann was, after all, Swiss, trained by the greatest of all bridge teachers in the modern world, Wilhelm Ritter, who communicated to his students the importance of the technical and the esthetic. And so, therefore, to get a perspective on American design, from which Ritter himself wrote a whole textbook, we should go back to Switzerland and see there the world's most beautiful bridges of the 20th century, a whole series of them that would bring us face to face with the possibilities for not just bridge engineering, but all engineering, as a, both a rational and an emotional profession, one which calls forth civic virtue as well as an understanding of the scientific basis and the social basis of our modern society.

It's important for the general public to know about engineering. We live in an engineering culture. And it's important for them to see that engineering in its, in its true meaning is really an integration of science, the nature into which these things are built, of society, the political and economic context, and of art, the ultimate meaning of the best bridges. And, therefore, once they see this, then we can begin the process which we so strongly need in our country, of reintegration of knowledge, of combating the fragmentation and specialization that has forced discourse into separated boxes and doesn't allow, therefore, the technical to think about the esthetic or the political to think about the technical. And when it's seen through these works that in order for the best of them to be built, they had to think about, the designers had to think about all these things, then one puts technology or engineering into a different context, not as a special school like all the other engineering schools, all the other professional schools in university, but as part of the central core of understanding that is so essential to our society.

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