Billington ’50 awarded engineering’s top honor

Billington, the Gordon Wu Professor of Engineering, has taught at the University for 47 years. He received the award during the ACEC’s annual fall conference in Montreal.

“It was wonderful,” Billington said, explaining that he did not expect ACEC’s call informing him of the honor. “It’s a nice confirmation of all the things that people think [about my work].”

ACEC president and CEO David Raymond said in an interview that Billington was one of the “truly outstanding people” who have “made substantial contributions to our society.” He added that Billington was given the award partially for the outstanding lectures he has given.

Billington, who has studied the intersection of engineering, design and society, said he has given “unusual” lectures to the ACEC. “The lecture I gave in 2007 was about structural art … Most people don’t think of engineering as art,” he explained.

The 2007 lecture to the ACEC was in preparation for an engineering exhibit in the University Art Museum, Billington added.

Billington was also given the award for his scholarship and the way it tries to describe how one can look at structural design through the lenses of aesthetics and history.

Billington espouses this viewpoint in his introductory engineering courses, CEE 262: Structures and the Urban Environment and CEE 102: Engineering in the Modern World.

“The two courses represent two courses I invented, actually,” Billington said, adding that he had to lay much of the groundwork for these classes when he began them in the ’70s and ’80s.

He explained that, in contrast to other areas of history, less scholarship had been done in the field of structural history. Without much printed material on engineering history, Billington said he initially had to research many of the things he wanted to include in his lecture notes.

Despite being an engineer and having connections with others in his field, Billington said he still had to research many of the important structural engineers. For CEE 262, for example, Billington explained, “Some of these people I already knew, some I didn’t … I began with people like these.”

Over the years, Billington compiled his lecture notes to compose engineering textbooks that were eventually printed and used by the engineering community.

These textbooks include “The Tower and the Bridge” and “Power, Speed, and Form: Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century.”

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After graduating from Princeton with a degree in basic engineering, Billington studied structural design in Belgium on a Fulbright scholarship. He later worked as a structural designer in New York before joining the University faculty in 1960.

The Distinguished Award of Merit has honored a variety of political figures and celebrities who have contributed to engineering, such as former U.S. presidents Herbert Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower and astronaut Neil Armstrong.

The award also includes an honorarium. Both Billington and Raymond declined to disclose the sum.