Hannskarl Bandel

James Franco's character in the 2008 movie Pineapple Express refers to Hannskarl when discussing his favorite civil engineers. In Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City protagonist Martin Probst clearly refers to Bandel as constructor of the Gateway Arch and puts him in the middle of a political conspiracy that finally unravels both, his professional life and his family.

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 St. 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.

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

Hannskarl Bandel's father was an architect who owned a construction firm, and his mother came from the Brechtel family, which owned the well-known German construction company of the same name, founded in 1883 by Johannes Brechtel. 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.