Ever notice how negative spaces realign as you traverse beneath bridge arches?
You’re on a bridge, driving or biking, getting across like it’s no trouble even if currents are a zillion miles per hour just below.
I take a lot of bridge pictures. I’m always stunned to be reminded of what’s possible through engineering, what art men’s minds are capable of.
Newton deduced one kind of physics, Euclid a geometry, Mandelbrot a math.
Inventive thinkers intuit concepts before there are exact words with which to express them. These people spark new ideas, which in turn become the seeds of new principles, laws and theories. Such foundations further intellectual study and can even spawn new disciplines.
Statics and dynamics, for example.
Bridge designers balance the internal pushes and pulls of compressive and tensile forces with moment forces–which keep a structure from tipping.
Its funny because most people I know in Olympia think bridges like that are ugly and architecture is as unnatural as the bra. They say “indian man make small campfire and sit very close, while white man make big fire in factory and live far away” at the cumbaya powows a lot.
You sound like Ayn Rand.
Thanks for the comment, Andy. Though it’s been many years since I read The Fountainhead, one line’s stayed with me. It’s about paying special care to the stretch in your neck as you lift your chin to the whole of New York City’s skyline.
Here’s another line:
“He said that architecture was truly the greatest of the arts, because it was anonymous, as all greatness. He said that the world had many famous buildings, but few renowned builders, which was as it should be, since no man had ever created anything of importance in architecture, or anywhere, for that matter” (The Fountainhead, 77).
Just wondering what you think of that idea.
Ernesto–Thank you for writing. This makes me ask, why do we create? A true artist is driven not by a need to impress. Instead, he is overwhelmed by a much more engaging pursuit–to gain those moments of creative flow, where time stills, the ego flees, and all that’s apparent is beauty.