Hannskarl Bandel

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Hannskarl Bandel (born May 3, 1925 in Dessau , † December 29, 1993 in Aspen , USA) was a German-American civil engineer .

Life

Hannskarl Bandel's father was an architect and owned a design office, and his mother came from the Brechtel family, who ran a well-known German construction company of the same name. This was founded in 1883 by Johannes Brechtel. Bandel was thus shaped for his career choice. He earned a doctorate in engineering from the Technical University of Berlin . After working in the German steel industry , he came to the USA after the Second World War with no money and two suitcases full of books and hoped to be able to build suspension bridges . Three years after joining engineer Fred Severud's New York firm , he became his equal partner.

Together with Severud he made some essential contributions and constructive innovations to various construction projects such as:

Bandel also created the shape of the Gateway Arch project by Eero Saarinen and improved the construction.

In 1978 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering . After Severud's retirement the company was sold to a Hungarian. Bandel went to DRC Consultants and worked on rope bridges, among other things. In 1980 he was offered a chair at the University of Graz , but he canceled because the work in the USA was more important to him.

Bandel was also involved in the planning, construction and execution of the new Sunshine Skyway Bridge . Prestressed concrete was not only used for the roadway, but also as a supporting element. In 1972 he was a consultant in the redevelopment of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. Bandel later also designed a study for the three-dimensional assembly of rod structures without tools in weightlessness for NASA's Mars Pathfinder project.

Bandel died of heart failure while skiing in Aspen .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Memorial Tributes: National Academy of Engineering, Volume 8 , National Academy of Engineering (NAE), contribution by Anton Tedesko (1996)
  2. Website of BHG Brechtel GmbH ( Memento of the original from July 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bhg-brechtel.com
  3. ^ Nguyen, A-D .: Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, 2003, Spans, 1-3