By Kate Rix
As a professor of art history at Berkeley, Darcy Grimaldo Grisby has examined painting in post-colonial France. But with her most recent book, she turns her gaze to larger — no, massive — pieces, built to strike awe in the hearts of viewers.
With this fall’s publication of Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal (Periscope Publishing) Grigsby writes about four of the world’s most famous landmarks and the context of their development.
“These works are a key way to look at imperialism,” says Grisgby. “They each demonstrate just what modern engineering could do: Build projects that changed the world, sometimes at immense cost to human lives.”
Colossal was a departure for Grigsby. Her expertise in French art notwithstanding, research for this book focused on the sheer logistical challenges of large-scale construction. With tutoring from a former Berkeley graduate student and a grant from the Mellon Foundation, Grigsby embarked on a two-year crash course in engineering.
She had help from two undergraduate research apprentices as well, who contributed research to two of the book’s chapters. One of them, Erica Lee, has now earned her B.A. and will begin graduate work in history at Berkeley next year. Her research involved the history and theories of architectural drawings and models.
With Colossal Grigsby reveals what may be known to only a few: the stories of these four geographically dispersed projects are closely entwined.
Behind the projects are three Frenchmen: Sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, who conceived and designed what would become the Statue of Liberty; Ferdinand de Lesseps, who developed the Suez Canal and initiated work on the Panama Canal; and structural engineer Gustave Eiffel. Each man was fascinated by the monuments of ancient Egypt, and each believed that modern engineering could outdo the work of the Pharoahs’ builders.
“The 19th century was a weird world,” says Grigsby. “People often think that modernity was born in 1900. The 19th century was more naïve, but also enamored and frightened by new technology.”
She explains how each project was part of a larger political agenda, including efforts by both Europe and the United States to have control over foreign territories. She also traces the ways the four projects overlapped and how the three men worked together.
For example, Bartholdi originally envisioned that what would later become the Statue of Liberty would stand at the entrance to the Suez Canal. That idea didn’t work out, however, and neither did some of the sculptor’s design concepts.
Bartholdi wanted to modernize the sculpture and planned on doing so by starting with a traditional terra cotta model and then blowing it up huge in copper. This would have made for an enormously heavy sculpture — impractical for a piece that was to be built outside Paris and shipped to America.
It was Gustave Eiffel who came up with the system of iron armature from which a copper “skin” hung on the outside of Lady Liberty. Eiffel’s design for a support structure that was only loosely connected to the copper exterior allowed the towering statue to withstand the winds of New York Harbor.
“The Statue of Liberty was such a contrast to the Sphinx,” says Grigsby, looking at the surprising juxtaposition of Statue of Liberty and Sphinx on the cover of her book. “It demonstrated just how much 19th–century engineering had trumped ancient Egypt. Eiffel was fascinated by this hollow metal woman and his armature was key to later skyscraper designs.”
