Robert Maillart
[1] Maillart did not excel in academic theories, but understood the necessity to make assumptions and visualize when analyzing a structure.
This overuse of mathematics annoyed Maillart, as he greatly preferred to stand back and use common sense to predict full-scale performance.
He was a gardener, not a licensed engineer, and sold his patents to contractors who built the first generation of reinforced concrete bridges in Europe.
By the early twentieth century, reinforced concrete became an acceptable substitute in construction for all previous structural materials, such as stone, wood, and steel.
People such as Monier had developed useful techniques for design and construction, but no one had created new forms that showed the full aesthetic nature of reinforced concrete.
Both of the bridges mentioned above are great examples of Maillart's ability to simplify design in order to allow for maximum use of materials and to incorporate the natural beauty of the structure's environment.
Selected from among 19 entrants in a design competition in part because of the low cost of his proposal, Maillart began construction of the Salginatobal Bridge in Schiers, Switzerland in 1929; it opened on 13 August 1930.
He constructed his first mushroom ceiling for a warehouse in Zurich, together with treating the concrete floor as a slab, rather than reinforcing it with beams.
Maillart also flared the bottom of the columns to reduce the pressure (force per area) on a certain point of the soil foundation.
By flaring the bottoms of the columns, the area of the load was more widely distributed, therefore reducing the pressure over the soil foundation.
Since concrete is very good in compression situations, it was the perfect material to support a large, unmoving mass of earth.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, major advances in design theory, graphic statics, and knowledge of material strengths had been achieved.
A third advance was a better method of graphical analysis, developed independently by James Clerk Maxwell (UK) and Karl Culmann.
Robert Maillart learned the analytical methods of his era, but he was most influenced by the principles developed by his mentor, Wilhelm Ritter, mentioned above.
