ABSTRACT
The anti-technology movement in the 1960s was aided in great part by the inability of engineers to articulate what they did for a living and why. The existential impulse to change the world stirs deep within the engineer. The engineer, in company with architects, artists, and city planners, has kept alive the public faith in the potentiality for beauty, majesty, and spirituality in construction. In spite of the many ugly and tasteless structures that mar our cities and landscapes, public enthusiasm for building has survived relatively unscathed through the recent years of disenchantment with technology. Water and earth are the substances that engaged the energies of the first engineer - the civil engineer. Civil engineering is the main trunk from which all branches of the profession have sprung. His existential bond to the earth, and expression of his own elemental being, need no further amplification, no additional testimonials.
