ABSTRACT
The public knows that civilization forms around civil works: for water, transportation, and shelter. The quality of public life depends, therefore, on the quality of such civil works as aqueducts, bridges, and meeting halls: their efficiency of design, their economy of construction, and the visual appearance of their completed forms. “Aesthetics” is a mysterious subject to most engineers, not lending itself to the engineers usual tools of analysis. The engineers’ aesthetic results from the conscious choice of form by engineers who seek the expression of structure. The modern world tends to classify towers and even bridges as architecture, creating an important, but subtle, fallacy. New buildings and city bridges suffered from valiant attempts to cover up or contort their structure into some reflection of stone form. Most people would agree that the ideals of structural art coincide with those of an urban society: conservation of natural resources, minimization of public expenditures, and the creation of a more visually appealing environment.
