CHSA 9th Meeting - University of Virginia

 Track 10 MODERNISM, Presentation 1

The Engineer, the Scientist, and the Builder: American Corporate Work in the Construction of Quito, Ecuador’s Airport, 1954 - 1960

Ernesto Bilbao

exb0001@auburn.edu

This article focuses on the construction of Quito, Ecuador’s first modern airport built by US contractor Smith Engineering and Construction Corporation (SECC) in the 1950s, beyond the traditional assets of the history and construction of this specific project. Instead, this paper aims to understand the airport’s construction as a result of a collective phenomenon delivered in the context of large US contractors and corporations working abroad and the specific representations built around their members: the engineer, the scientist, and the builder.

In 1952, architect Walter Gropius thought that the design and construction of large projects would depend on the collective work driven by “the engineer, the scientist, and the builder.”1 According to Gropius, professionals would be forced to work closely within a co-operating team in the process of building production. In 1947, historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock had also identified the model of large teamwork firms specialized in the design and construction of industrial and basic institutional architecture globally. He believed that the quality of the work depended solely on an established “fool-proof system of a rapid and complete plan of production” handled by organized and specialized technical divisions.2

In 1954, the government of Ecuador commissioned Quito’s airport design, including the terminal, to Airways Engineering Corporation (AEC), based in Washington DC, and awarded its construction to SECC, based in Pensacola, Florida. Ecuador’s government based this decision mainly on the two companies’ corporate strength, expertise in airport design and construction, and operational capacity of realizing the work at a significant distance from their office headquarters. Contractual documents indicate how Ecuador’s authorities identified the design and construction of the airport in the hands of US corporations as the best mechanism to carry on with Ecuador’s idealistic route to modernization. This appreciation laid on how team-based offices had become the norm within design and construction practice in the US and how the US corporation had positioned itself as the representative and dominant form of business globally.

Both corporations, AEC and SECC, seemed to amalgamate a multidisciplinary cohort of professionals capable of handling specific and complicated projects abroad. This recognition also rested on how team-based work managed all project phases—from site planning, architecture, interior design, engineering of all kinds, budgeting, construction, supervision, and administration. Historical records show that local state agencies and the public media constantly associated the airport’s construction, including the terminal, with highly specialized engineering work. This notion indicates that the airport’s construction was thought locally in strict connection with cross-disciplinary international firms capable of pursuing complicated projects: the corporation.

Building off this historical framework, this paper aims to illustrate the particular circumstances in the construction of Quito’s airport carried on by SECC and the imagery associated with the expertise, professional collaboration, and knowledge of its engineers and workers. This paper uses official documents, photographs, and newspaper articles to help understand the broader different perceptions of US corporations working in foreign countries, such as Ecuador. It also helps comprehend how the work of SECC created particular images around the engineer, the scientist, and the builder, during the construction of Quito, Ecuador’s first modern airport.

1 Walter Gropius, “Gropius Appraises Today’s Architect,” Architectural Forum, (May 1952): 111.
2 Hitchcock Henry-Russell, “The Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Genius,” Architectural Review 101, no. 601 (January 1947): 3–6.

Ernesto Bilbao is an assistant professor at Auburn University’s School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture, where he teaches advanced design studios and History and Theory of Architecture. He holds a Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin, an M.Arch from Rice University in Houston as a Fulbright Scholar, and a B.Arch from Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. He is also the founding principal of Estudio Ernesto Bilbao, based in Quito, Ecuador, which focuses on landscape architecture and architectural design. His research focuses on the development of the old airport of Quito since the first airplane landed in the city’s environs and the effects that aviation had on its cultural landscape and processes of modernization and post-colonization.