Eugène Freyssinet

French architect

• Born: July 13, 1879
• Birthplace: Objat, France
• Died: June 8, 1962
• Place of death: Saint-Martin-Vésubie, France

Through craftsmanship and enterprise, Freyssinet brought the aesthetic and practical utilization of modern forms of prestressed concrete (he invented the term in 1933) into international currency as a permanent form of construction. He won renown both in France and in Great Britain as a major architect-engineer who expanded the availability of novel architectural materials, thereby freshening opportunities for each of these professions.

Early Life

Eugène Freyssinet (yew-zhehn fray-see-neh) was born in the village of Objat in the Corrèze district of south central France. The Corrèze Plateau was a harsh region of rocky waste, deep gorges, dense forests, and largely unarable soils. Freyssinet’s parents sprang from generations of shrewd, skillful, hardworking peasants and craftsmen, whose efforts reflected an almost innate simplicity and economy. Freyssinet’s mother was of this peasant stock; one of his grandmothers operated the ancient local flour and oil mill, while his father, although orphaned from birth, displayed intellectual initiatives and ambitions far beyond his traditional station as an agricultural laborer, becoming a local teacher and bailiff a rural bourgeois with an appreciation of the arts. In 1885, when Freyssinet was six, his father, seeking broader horizons for himself and his two sons, moved the family to Paris.

For Freyssinet and his younger brother (later an artist), Paris meant education at the parish school in the rue des Écluses-Saint-Martin. Impressed by his teachers, Freyssinet, nevertheless, detested Paris, principally because his schoolmates endlessly mocked his apparent provincialism. He therefore cultivated his own inner world. Indeed, these unhappy situations in part engendered his series of illnesses, which, regardless of impeding his studies, persuaded his parents to return him for lengthy periods to the family’s native Corrèze district.

During these interludes, he informally received his real education from local craftsmen: regional carpenters, weavers, joiners, smiths, and masons. Having joined such canny men in repairing embankments, farm buildings, machinery, and housing, he considered himself a complete craftsman by the age of twenty: one utterly devoted to technical honesty, intolerant of deficiencies in professional consciences, and disdainful of those not sharing these attributes. Meanwhile, shuttling to school in Paris during such interludes, he studied chemistry, physics, and electricity at night; while at home free from adolescent cruelties he experimented with many of his own inventions.

In 1898, Freyssinet failed an attempt to enter the famed École Polytechnique, but, with innate tenacity, he succeeded on his reapplication in 1899. The attitudes of the students at the École Polytechnique and the school’s intellectual rigor (if not its tedious discipline) suited him. Dubious about the school’s emphasis on mathematics to the detriment of craftsmanship, he nevertheless was graduated nineteenth in his class. Now among the elite, he opted for additional training in the esteemed École des Ponts et Chaussées, a postgraduate institution for civil engineers that virtually assured public or private success along that line. Moreover, his principal teacher, Charles Rabut, lectured during 1903 and 1904 on ideas that later delineated Freyssinet’s professional preoccupation: the prestressing of concrete.

Life’s Work

Relative to the architectural and engineering practices dominating Paris prior to World War I, the utilization of reinforced concrete publicly represented a bold approach to new materials and construction, much like the replacement of wood with steel. In engineering circles, the employment of reinforced concrete was no novelty. Among other pioneers were François Hennebique and Robert Maillart. Spanish and German architects and civil engineers, too, were testing reinforced concrete in their structural works. As Freyssinet acknowledged, there was nothing complicated or mysterious about the idea of prestressing concrete. Widespread utilization of combinations of concrete and steel, however, lagged behind ideas about their potential.

Joining the École des Ponts et Chaussées in 1905, Freyssinet was dispatched to the Allier département, based in Moulins on a tributary of the Loire River, the Allier River. Local needs differing little from those of the Corrèze, he soon fulfilled promises to officials that he would design and construct more and better bridges below budget. Besides designing, he threw his own hands into the direction of cementers, iron workers, coffer makers, and carpenters, often to the delight of locals, ignoring official regulations. It was work that left him contented.

In 1907, however, Freyssinet met François Mercier, a major private contractor, once again altering his future. Mercier’s problem was replacing three obsolete Allier River suspension bridges. Freyssinet assured Mercier that his own designs and direction would resolve problems of 250-meter spans, shortages of money, and difficult geological conditions. Convinced, Mercier guaranteed the work to Paris. Freyssinet then devoted himself to these major spans from 1907 until 1912, confounding problems peculiar to the sites and requirements of each structure and producing superior bridges at minimal costs.

Each experience, including a steel-concrete bridge begun in 1914 at Villeneuve, taught him more about the qualities of reinforced concrete and the possibilities of prestressing it. With the sagging of the Le Vendre Bridge on the Allier River, however, he faced his first near disaster. Yet he ingeniously retrieved the situation by inventing a series of jacks that prevented arch collapse.

Gradually, his observations revealed characteristics of concrete-steel interactions unknown to him, namely, the existence of creep. Like stone, concrete is strong in compression but weak in tension. The horizontal tensions on the Le Vendre structure had driven him to discover the causes of its deformation and to his novel, if simple, solution. Concrete cracking, creep, or deformation could be averted by devising forms of horizontal compression such as his use of jacks to salvage the Le Vendre Bridge or, better yet, by employing high-strength steel cables to generate the requisite horizontal compression.

Subsequently, Freyssinet cast concrete beams with end-to-end curved holes in them. Steel cables, several times stronger than those emplaced in reinforced concrete, were then strung through the holes, anchored, and placed under pressure at both ends, furnishing essential compression. This permitted pushing or compressing concrete beams or arches up or down, depending on the loads to be carried. It also stopped the cracking that eventually occurred when low-strength steel was embedded in traditional reinforced concrete. Freyssinet had moved to the fore in ferroconcrete prestressing technology.

In 1914, continuing engineering tasks as part of his wartime service, he accepted a private position that was to commence formally at the end of his military tour; as planned, he joined the firm of Claude Limousin as a director. By 1929, with Limousin’s firm, he had gained worldwide recognition with some of his spectacular constructions: notable among them the 96.25-meter, doubled-ridged arch bridge at Villeneuve-sur-Lot, completed in 1919; the two great parabolic corrugated dirigible hangars at Orly with a span of eighty-six meters and a height of fifty meters; and, in the 1920’s and 1930’s, the Sambre River’s Candelier Bridge; the St. Pierre du Vauvray Bridge, singular then for the world’s lengthiest concrete arches (131.8 meters); and the great, prestressed arch bridge at Plougastel on the Brest estuary, completed in 1930.

Having failed in his ventures to manufacture prestressed electrification poles and railroad sleepers, he recovered with his design of prestressed concrete foundations to save Le Havre’s sinking maritime terminal in 1935. During and after World War II, he continued with prestressed concrete construction for French and foreign dams and bridges and not least with his distinguished underground basilica at Lourdes. Officially decorated in France, he was also only one of few Frenchmen honored by Great Britain’s Royal Architectural Society. He died at the age of eighty-two in the southeastern French town of Saint-Martin-Vésubie on June 8, 1962.

Significance

Freyssinet’s international distinction as an architect and engineer emerged from his characteristic honesty, his economy of money and materials, his simplicity, and his untiring, attentive observations and research. He moved against the grain of his colleagues’ and the public’s preferences for traditional architectural designs and for more familiar construction materials and methods, and the result was a triumph of his devotion to perfecting prestressed concrete building. By 1962, the uses of his innovations, in number and variety, had become international and commonplace.

For his successors, Freyssinet had unraveled, through his own researches, fresh appreciation of the qualities of reinforced and prestressed concrete such as what happened when they were combined with other materials, what tensions and compressions they could develop and sustain, and how best they might be added to the stock of architectural and engineering alternatives. That knowledge has been exploited in dams, bridges, airports, stadiums, churches, and in the seemingly weightless prestressed concrete entrances to hotels, public places, and private homes throughout the world. Human-made concrete bears qualities of stone: rigidity, dead weight, and solidity. Freyssinet’s innovations in allying it with steel deprived that so-called stone of its ordinary characteristics, and when best employed, aesthetically lent it apparent lightness and soaring curvatures.

Bibliography

Association Pour La Mèmoire et Le Rayonnement des Trauvaux d’Eugène Freyssinet. Eugène Freyssisnet: A Revolution in the Art of Construction. Paris: Presses de L’École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, 2004. This is an English edition of a book that was also published in French. It offers a comprehensive overview of Freyssinet’s life and contributions to architecture and describes the various structures he built.

Billington, David P. The Tower and the Bridge: The New Art of Structural Engineering. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. A brilliantly presented and authoritative work by a leading American civil engineer. Superbly written, beautifully illustrated with photographs and with a substantial chapter on Freyssinet. This is a critical, balanced account of important advances in structural engineering and is invaluable. Contains chapter notes and a useful index.

Fernandez Ordoñez, José A. Eugène Freyssinet. Barcelona: 2c Ediciones, 1978. Massive and bilingual, this well-written work thoroughly covers Freyssinet’s personal and professional history. Among its hundreds of photographs are many rare personal pictures of Freyssinet from childhood throughout life, often with family members. Includes an exhaustive photographic history of all of his major and many of his minor works (at various stages of construction). It is critical but also a great tribute to Freyssinet’s accomplishments.

A Half Century of French Prestressing Technology. Paris: Special Edition of Travaux, 1966. Invaluable biographical and professional materials on Freyssinet by himself and others. A six-hundred-page book, it contains hundreds of photographs and drawings, including many of Freyssinet’s chief works and two appendixes by him.

Kingsford, P. W. Builders and Building Workers. London: Edward Arnold, 1973. A delightful, well-written book. Chapter 6 draws on Freyssinet’s personal and professional development excerpted from less available materials. Includes suggestions for further reading, a few illustrations, and a brief index.