Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal

by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

"In this generously illustrated book, acclaimed Berkeley art historian Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby gives us the definitive account of a history that leads from Napoleon’s encounter with the gigantic monuments of ancient Egypt to the building of the wonders of the industrial the Statue of Liberty, Suez Canal, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal. Though now landmarks as famed as the pyramids, Grigsby shows us that all four colossi owe their existence to French engineers and the fantasies of wealth, progress, and colonial expansion they and French financiers and politicians took as a call to destiny.
Grigsby goes beyond the boundaries of art history to take her subject in the round. She sets the exploits of characters like Bartholdi and Eiffel against the backdrop of universal expositions touting the new, science fiction predicting future glories, and cartoons deflating the hyperbole. She explains the systems of numbers—from profits promised and shares sold to calculations of wind resistance—used to promote and then build the colossi. Her book provides more than 200 illustrations, not of "art," but of the engineering of the colossi and the visual culture publicizing their construction.
Instead of approaching modernism through the emergence of avant-garde practices in the fine arts, Grigsby looks at a time of tragic drama when technology became an instrument of imperialist enterprise and topdown efforts to control and exploit the world’s resources, including workers. By uncovering the links between the building of the canals and the erection of the Statue of Liberty and Eiffel Tower, she offers a searing lesson in the network of power and influence permeating even cherished icons of human achievement.
Passionately argued, peerless in its research, its synthesis, and its depth of understanding, Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal is a magisterial addition to serious study of the modern world."

200 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2012

Reviews

[Caterina Pierre]

This book was a bit of a slog, mainly because it is all over the place in terms of media discussed, time periods, and a lack of true focus on the thesis. The real point of the book, I think, was supposed to be about Colossi and the effects of colonialism. While that is well covered in the chapter on the Panama Canal, it was less so in other chapters. There are errors in the book, like the statement that Bartholdi never went to Italy (he did in April of 1865), and that weakens the book. The format is pretty awful: it's an academic book in the format of a coffee table book; the images have captions with numbers that do not correspond directly to the images; there are annoying typos in the book (numerous times where there are hyphens in the book that do not belong). It needed better editing. The author inserts herself into the dialogue but without clear reasons. When she tries to explain engineering formulas, I almost gave up. There are a few interesting parts, and the chapters on the Statue of Liberty & the Eiffel Tower were the most readable.