Once, in a younger America, architects and engineers alike were simply called “builders”: people, mostly men, who had both design and construction skills. But after the American Institute of Architects was founded in 1857, the professions split. Architects began to garner all the glory while engineers toiled in their shadows. At the 1964 dedication of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, then the world’s longest suspension bridge, Robert Moses actually seemed to forget the name of Othmar Ammann, its designer and argua...
