ABSTRACT
This inquiry began with the questions, what is an architectural engineer and what is architectural engineering? The term, architectural engineer, has been in use for over one hundred fifty years. Today, the term is as vague as it was in the 1840s. It is an anglophile word without precise meaning. Does it describe architects that are engineers and more technical in nature or does it mean that engineers that are more similar to architects and sympathetic to design? Does one profession have more claims to the term than the other? Or, is it something different altogether? In 1995, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) created a special technical group, the Architectural Engineering Institute (AEI), to address their version of the field that refers to engineering specific to buildings. This includes the subjects of structural, electrical, and mechanical engineering. However, the term has sometimes been used to bestow an honor to an engineer who has 'surpassed' being an ‘ordinary’ structural engineer. Matthew Wells, a British practitioner and author, writes of an architectural engineer as “not just an engineer with design flair, but rather one closely aligned with the architect and seeking to coordinate an engineering input with an integrated whole,”(Wells, 2010). With these two modern uses, one starts to see the confusion in the use of the term. Does it refer to someone’s training? Or, does it describe an engineer’s inclinations? If it is about engineering, what does architecture have to do with it? This paper, ambitious in its scope, seeks to bring more meaning to the term by examining its use over the past century. The term itself is a symbol for the larger story of the relationship of architecture to engineering and of architects to engineers. Perhaps by understanding its early uses and applications, the significance of the word can be better understood in the Anglo-American world. This paper is the beginning of the exploration of the term.
