Hannskarl Bandel

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Hannskarl Bandel (May 3, 1925 Dessau, Germany - December 29, 1993 Aspen, Colorado), was a German-American structural engineer.

Hannskarl Bandel's father was an architect who owned a construction firm, and his mother came from the Bechtel family, which owned the construction giant of the same name. This may have been a contributing factor in his choice of profession and study: he took a doctorate in engineering at the Technical University of Berlin. After working in the German steel industry, he came to the United States after World War II with no money and two suitcases full of books, hoping to build suspension bridges. Three years after joining the New York firm of engineer Fred Severud, he was made a full partner.

With Severud, he made crucial, creative structural contributions to important mid-century architectural projects such as:

It was Bandel who modified the inverted catenary shape for Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch project. When Saarinen tried to demonstrate his desired shape with a chain suspended in his hands, he couldn't achieve the slightly elongated, "soaring" effect he wanted; Bandel asked for the chain, came back in a few days, and delighted the architect by producing Saarinen's curve, as if by magic. Bandel had replaced some of the constant-sized links with variable links, thus changing the weight, the distribution of the weight, and the shape.

In 1978, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. After Fred Severud's retirement, the firm, despite Bandel's objections, was bought by a Hungarian engineer. Bandel left the firm and became the senior vice-president of DRC Consultants, working on cable-stayed bridges and various other structures. He was offered the chair of structural engineering at the University of Graz, Austria, in 1980, but turned down the offer, saying that his challenging assignments in America were more important to him than a prestigious professorship in Europe.

Bandel was also an expert on creative structural renovation and retrofitting. According to Benjamin Horace Weese, Bandel personally saved the deteriorating Guastavino tile dome at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine by New York City in 1972 by recommending that its supporting granite piers be insulated. In later years Bandel produced an innovative study for three-dimensional trusses to be assembled without tools in zero gravity, for the NASA Mars Pathfinder project.

Bandel died of heart failure while skiing at Aspen Highlands in Aspen, Colorado.

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