No respect

Concrete Construction, August, 2004 by William D. Palmer, Jr.

When a beautiful new concrete building is completed, who gets the credit? Strangely enough, it seems that the recognition is inversely proportionate to the effort and risk. For example, there may soon be a new Trump Tower in Chicago, but Donald Trump isn't the builder, or even the architect--that's Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Rather Trump's the guy with the money, so I guess it's fair he gets to put his name on the place. But the concrete contractor, whose brains and sweat will go into the construction, and who will risk everything to erect the world's tallest structural concrete building, will not be memorialized, except perhaps in the pages of this magazine.

Werner Gumpertz, principal with Simpson, Gumpertz, and Heger, and a leading structural engineer, wrote to us recently to comment that our article about the new Liquid Stone exhibition (June, p. 24) "is a disservice to the engineering profession and reveals an arrogant contempt by the National Building Museum for the engineers of many of the concrete monuments listed ... not a single engineer connected with [these] bridges and other monumental engineering structures [is listed]." What I notice, again, is that the contractors who built these incredible structures aren't credited either, and no one complained about that.

Our culture as a whole values youth and creativity over the more boring task of simply getting the job done. Sitting down and developing a schedule and working drawings for a building project is not nearly as interesting as coming up with a grand vision. Working through all of the problems architects create with their grand designs seems irrelevant. And yet, without us boring types, the architect's genius would be nothing more than a pretty picture. Sometimes I think architects even like that idea--why muss their pretty color drawings with the mud and mess generated by building the structure?

Most people find even the subject of concrete somehow unfortunate. When people ask what I do, I'm always amused by the transformation from the early interest (Oh, you're a magazine editor? What's the name of the magazine?) to the look of disappointment when I say CONCRETE CONSTRUCTION. It's as if they are wondering what on earth could be interesting about concrete. Even one of the editors of another Hanley Wood magazine once asked me how we could possibly find enough to write about every month.

So the architects take all the credit, and the engineers, and contractors don't get the recognition they deserve. I don't see that changing in my lifetime so I guess we'll have to live with it and be satisfied in a job well done--and hopefully a little profit.