beautiful structures and the revival of public life

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In 1983, David P. Billington began his book The Tower and the Bridge with words that could be written today:

While automation prospers, our roads, bridges, and urban civil works rot. Children control computers while adults weave between potholes. The higher that high technology sails the worse seem our earthbound services for water, transportation, and shelter. Yet civilization is civil works and insofar as these deteriorate so does society, our high technology notwithstanding. We forget that technology is as much structures as it is machines, and that these structures symbolize our common life as much as machines stand for our private freedoms. Technology is frequently equated only with machines, those objects that save labor, multiply power, and increase mobility. In reality, machines are only one half of technology, the dynamic half, and structures are the other, static, half — objects that create a water supply, permit transportation, and provide shelter.

This book is devoted to the idea that structures, the forgotten half of modem technology, provide a key to the revival of public life.

Billington offers several provocative distinctions. We have already seen how he distinguishes structures from machines. He also differentiates engineers from architects:

Structural designers give the form to objects that are of relatively large scale and of single use, and these designers see forms as the means of controlling the forces of nature to be resisted. Architectural designers, on the other hand, give form to objects that are of relatively small scale and of complex human use, and these designers see forms as the means of controlling the spaces to be used by people. The prototypical engineering form–the public bridge–requires no architect. The prototypical architectural form–the private house–requires no engineer.

And he distinguishes (structural) engineering from science–even from applied science. In his account, engineering depends on experience and judgment, not on the application of mathematical principles or laws. If I understand correctly, he wants us to realize that a suspension bridge is not a line with mathematical qualities that can be derived from physics. It is a whole bunch of stuff (including joints, hinges, and other components) that works in a particular location. Engineers use thought-experiments, physical models, and experience to draft their designs and often correct them during the construction.

Central to his argument is the claim that engineers have been compelled (since ca. 1790) to pursue, or even to maximize, “efficiency, economy, and elegance.” Whereas an architect might be hired to make an attractive version of something that we already know how to design, a structural engineer’s job is to solve a new problem (such as spanning a river) at minimal cost. But Billington insists that great engineers have been deeply aesthetic and that judgments of beauty have spurred more efficient and economical designs. A good example is the Salginatobel Bridge (1930) by Robert Maillart, which illustrates this post.

Before reading Billington, I would have cited cultural reasons for the turn away from ornamentation and other explicit forms of “style” in modernist architecture, and I would have observed the same turn in other arts, including painting and poetry. I would have said that a recognition of cultural variation–the idea that each time and place has its own style–convinced modernists that style was arbitrary and contingent and turned them toward minimalism and functionalism.  Walter Gropius wrote:

We have had enough and to spare of the arbitrary reproduction of historical styles … The modern building should derive its architectural significance solely from the vigour and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself … A breach has been made with the past. … The morphology of dead styles has been destroyed; we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling.

For Billington, however, Gropius and other modernist architects were not the driving force. Structural engineers made beautiful things without ornamentation because their job was to maximize efficiency.

Engineers’ most prominent and influential creations have been public objects, like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Eiffel Tower. “Technological forms live also in the social world. Their forms are shaped by the patterns of politics and economics as well as by the laws of nature.” And successful structural engineers are good at navigating those social “patterns.”

Billington even wants to connect democracy to the modern advances of structural engineering:

These forms imply a democratic rather than an autocratic life. When structure and form are one, the result is a lightness, even a fragility, which closely parallels the essence of a free and open society. The workings of a democratic government are transparent, conducted in full public view, and although a democracy may be far from perfect, its form and its actual workings (its structure) are inseparable. Furthermore, the public must continually inspect its handiwork; constant maintenance and periodic renewal are essential to its exposed structure. Politicians do not have life tenure; they must be inspected, chastised and purified from time to time, and replaced. when found corrupt or inept. So it is with the works of structural art. They, too, are subject to the weathering and fatigue of open use. They remind us that our institutions belong to us and not to some elite. If we let them deteriorate, as we flagrantly have in our older cities and transportation networks, then that outward sign betokens an inner corruption of the common life in a free democratic society

I find this paragraph moving but not necessarily persuasive. When George Orwell wanted to distinguish radical and genuinely democratic socialism from Stalinism, he urged the left to stop bragging about Soviet “mechanical progress, tractors, the Dnieper dam, and the latest salmon-canning factory in Moscow.” For Orwell, excellent structural engineering did not equal democracy.

I’m not even sure that impressive structural engineering always depends on a state. Whether you approve or disapprove of it, Steinway Tower at 111 West 57th Street, NYC (2021) is an impressive engineering feat, extending the tradition of slender simplicity to house 84 stories of private, luxury condominiums.

I have some other questions for Billington. He suggests that structural engineering–in the form that he describes–is a modern development. I can accept that no one had explicitly defended its principles or distinguished engineering from architecture before Thomas Telford in 1812. But surely the practice of engineering is very old on all inhabited continents, and perhaps previous engineers (or master builders) saw themselves in similar ways without writing articles about it.

For Billington, the Eiffel Tower is a paradigm of structural engineering. I would ask: Why isn’t it architecture? Its sheer size can’t be the criterion, because architects have also designed very large objects. Perhaps the Eiffel Tower accomplishes its task with maximum efficiency, but its task is not utilitarian. Its job is to reach as high as possible. Maybe it is a gigantic sculpture?

Finally, Billington argues that the beautiful minimalist structures of the 1800s and 1900s resulted from the application of new technologies (plentiful iron; then steel and concrete) under constraints of efficiency and economy. But earlier I suggested a different origin for minimalism, one that can explain free verse and abstract expressionist paintings as well as glass-clad skyscrapers. Could it be that there have always been efficiency-maximizing engineers, but the public gained aesthetic appreciation for their work as a result of cultural changes after 1800? In that case, structural engineering is old, but we see it in new ways thanks to modernist artists.

Any provocative and compelling book will prompt critical questions, but Billington’s 1983 work endures as an argument for good structural engineering as a component of democratic public life.

See also: explaining the crisis in architecture (with the Gropius quote and other background); three great paintings in dialogue. I quote Orwell from The Road to Wigan Pier.

community engagement and concern for democratic values

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I am interested in the Tocquevillian thesis that participating in voluntary groups enhances democratic and liberal values.

John Dewey was another major proponent of this view. Alan Ryan emphasizes Dewey’s belief that democracy, properly understood, “bubble[s] naturally upward from small-scale interactions and [is] not to be imposed from above.” (Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, 1995, p.169).

The Democracy for All Project is a collaboration between the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and Gallup that collects representative survey data, most recently from 23,000 people surveyed from April 24 to June 10, 2026. The main report is entitled Frustration Rises, Commitment Endures.

I analyzed the raw data from Kettering/Gallup, looking for relationships between three measures of community engagement and several beliefs relevant to democracy.

The three measures of community engagement are:

  • “How often do you attend events in your community, such as festivals, town halls, arts performances, etc.”?
  • “How often do you usually attend church, synagogue, mosque, or temple?”
  • [Have you] “volunteered or actively participated in organizations or groups that are designed to improve conditions in your community”?

I chose these three because they offer a nice range of frequent forms of engagement.

I put them in regression models along with gender, age, race/ethnicity, education, and partisanship. I will report the relationships between those variables and the following questions of interest.

1. [Are you concerned are about] “People being harmed by federal agents, military, or law enforcement during peaceful protests”?

    To make my assumptions explicit, I want people to say yes to this question. The model shows that people are more likely to agree if they are younger, more highly educated, not White, and if they volunteer in their communities or attend community events. But they are less likely to agree if they attend religious services frequently. Party identification and gender are unrelated to this outcome.

    Because I used a regression model, we can reject the explanation that local engagement is related to this democratic value because the people who are locally engaged are younger or more diverse or more highly educated. The model is supposed to detect relationships that hold once everything else is held constant. So a White, less educated person who volunteers is more likely to be concerned than one who is not.

    2. [Are you concerned are about] “People who are ineligible to vote casting ballots in U.S. elections”?

      Again, to disclose my own assumptions: I am against ineligible people voting, but I think this is very rare, and being very concerned about it is problematic. So I would like people to say no.

      In the model, concern is lower for those who are Democrats, female, younger, and more educated and who volunteer. It is higher for those who attend religious services. Attending local events is unrelated.

      3. “How concerned, if at all, are you that political leaders are blaming or targeting people from certain groups for problems they see in the country?“

      Here I would want to see agreement. Positive answers go with being a Democrat, female, younger, not White, and more educated. Support also rises with volunteering and attending events, but religious attendance is negatively correlated.

      [Are you concerned are about]“Political leaders pressuring election officials to change election outcomes”?

      For the record, I am concerned. So are people who are younger, female, more highly educated, prone to volunteer, frequent attendees at local events, and not regular attendees in religious services. Party identification is not significantly related to this question in the model, meaning that it can be explained away with the other variables.

      Overall, we see some support for the Tocquevillian thesis, except that church participation is negatively related to the values that I would espouse. (This is not always the case: see “active church membership may counteract problematic religious messages” and “church attendance, religious identity, and politics” [revisited].) For some of these questions, the relationship with party identification drops out once we measure the other factors. Volunteering has a consistent relationship with the values that I would espouse. Attending local events is less consistent.

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      No, how could I believe in my poetry
      If even David Plante disbelieves in his?
      But I, too, can ask why I want to write,
      Expecting no success but enjoying
      A cool pool of words in which to slide down,
      Noises fading in the muffling depths, or
      Like rinsing mud from the side of a bucket,
      Leaving a hot pan to soak until the stain
      Softens, or trailing fingers through water
      To mark it momentarily with my mind.
      It is not what happens but how it feels
      To choose to cool a hot thought slowly down,
      To shape a portion of fluid into form.

      See also: signal (2015); a poem should (2013)

      what should be the mission of a great university?

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      The recent Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education says:

      Focus on the mission. In 2016, departing from its traditional emphasis on the creation and dissemination of knowledge, Yale expanded its mission statement to include “improving the world today,” educating “aspiring leaders worldwide,” and fostering “an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.” These are all worthy goals. But they are not what makes a university a university. We recommend that Yale adopt a focused university-wide mission statement such as the one currently articulated in its own Faculty Handbook: “Yale University’s mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.” This statement serves as the basis for the recommendations that follow in this report.

      When I led a discussion of this report with a large group of Tufts undergraduates through CEVIHE last week, some students expressed skepticism or cynicism about official mission statements. I agree. I usually view such texts as mere advertising copy–including the Tufts’ mission statement, which looks to me like outreach to prospective undergraduates.

      That said, I think the Yale faculty committee was right that any recommendations for an institution should flow from an authentic idea of that institution’s mission (whether it is stated on its website or not). Therefore, choosing a mission statement for a university is a worthy task.

      Yale’s current mission is very different from the one proposed by a faculty committee of the same university in 1828. They asked “What then is the appropriate object of a college?” Their answer: “the discipline and the furniture of the mind: expanding its powers, and storing it with knowledge.”

      In those days, Yale made no pretense of creating knowledge. It did not hire faculty to conduct research and scholarship. The teachers’ job was to transfer the knowledge that they had already acquired when they were students–particularly their knowledge of the ancient languages–to “furnish” young men’s minds.

      The mission that the recent Yale report endorses derives from Johns Hopkins’ founding goal, “to advance the arts and sciences.” In fact, the Yale report echoes the 1872 inaugural address of Hopkins’ first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, who said that universities may have many functions, but what makes them universities in the promotion of knowledge. His ideal, in turn, reflected Prussian influences.

      I think that knowledge is good, but it is certainly not all that Yale actually does. Consider that 30% of Yale’s revenues come from medical services, or that it budgets about $89 million for athletics, or that it allocates a portfolio of about $441 billion. Descriptively, one could say that Yale’s mission is to operate a hospital and an investment fund.

      But a mission statement should be aspirational, and Yale could strive to make all of its other functions serve its knowledge mission. That would be a choice, different from an ideal such as public service or developing students’ character.

      To choose a mission for any given university, it might be helpful to select a guiding analogy or model. What should the institution be like?

      1. A laboratory: This is a place where knowledge is created, preserved, and shared. People who work in a lab may disagree, and their disagreements can be valuable, but the goal is always to resolve disputes with evidence. Laboratory workers may learn and develop ethically, but scientific methods and instruments are supposed to be people-proof, so that they can generate knowledge irrespective of the scientists’ characteristics. The main outcome is the findings contained in publications.
      2. A debating society (or an op-ed page, or a high-quality talk show): This is a place where people exchange opinions. To be interesting and valuable, it must welcome–and even curate–diverse opinions. Whenever everyone seems to agree, it is time to invite someone who has a different “take.” The main outcome is the education of participants and listeners.
      3. An advanced prep school: a university like Yale (which, for full disclosure, I attended) could be analogized to a boarding school. It is a place where young people live together, develop skills and networks, and prepare for the next level. The main outcomes are the successes and contributions of the graduates.
      4. A not-for-profit, multi-purpose corporation. Yale could be seen as an entity that operates a major hospital, owns many of the prominent buildings of a mid-sized US city, serves food, attracts more tourists than any other site in Connecticut, runs a significant regional repertory theater, discovers medical advances, fields a football team, and does anything else that its trustees choose as long as the surplus revenue goes to endowment. The outcomes are diverse.
      5. A city: Cities do not have mission statements–nor should they, because their residents must be free to pursue their own goals. But the mission of a city government can be to serve its residents. In the same way, a university can offer a range of services to its members, who should be able to pursue various goals. The immediate outcomes are the well-being of students and other members of the community. (This suggestion came from a student during the CEVIHE discussion.)

      I worry that it is in bad faith to claim that a university’s mission is knowledge. If the pursuit of knowledge is supposed to determine everything a university does, then many of its actual functions should be spun off. And to interpret a $441 billion endowment as simply a means to the end of promoting knowledge is a convenient way to ignore its other outcomes. With more than $20 billion invested in private equity, Yale is the 31st largest private equity institutional investor in the world. That money has many other affects besides generating returns that can pay for laboratories and seminar rooms.

      Here is a different way of thinking about such issues. In a provocatively entitled article, “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” (1972), Cohen, March and Olsen posited that any “organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work. … To understand processes within organizations, one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated.”

      The phrase “garbage can” sounds pejorative and isn’t really necessary. The core idea is that complex organizations develop so that they have multiple functions. If that describes a modern university, then debates about its mission statement are worthwhile but will never resolve the question. Universities are opportunities for people to pursue various agendas, and they will make competing claims about “the” mission. Perhaps the best universities are those in which this ongoing debate is handled relatively wisely.

      See also: the university between a club good and the commons; universities and newsrooms as laboratories or debating societies

      translating Mind is Mind-Made

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      Few lines of text have been memorized by as many human beings over as many centuries as this one:

      manopubbangama dhamma, manosettha manomaya

      You don’t have to know the language to glean that it is verse. It consists of two pairs of eight syllables–a pattern that repeats for many subsequent lines after this one. Gama rhymes with dhamma, and three different words begin with mano.

      You can’t tell from the Latin characters alone, but this line scans in a classic rhythm called siloka in Pali, which uses “light” (short) and “heavy” (long) syllables. You could get some sense of the metrical pattern by reading aloud the following string of English words:

      Short short longer longer
      Short longer longer longer
      Short short longer longer
      Short short short longer

      These features make the line enjoyable and work as mnemonics. Regular verse is easier to memorize than prose.

      All the words are very abstract, and they mark out zones of meaning that have no equivalents in English. In fact, some translators use the Sanskrit dharma to render the Pali word dhamma in English. Dharma can mean law, duty, doctrine, righteousness, experience, phenomena, thing, or truth. A modern English-speaker may get more from that one famous Sanskrit word than from any single English word chosen to render it.

      There is no verb, because Pali, like Latin, can leave the verb “to be” implied.

      The first person who translated this line into English, F. Max Müller, wrote, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thought” (1898).

      Asked to translate it literally, ChatGPT proposes, “Phenomena have mind as their forerunner; mind is their chief; they are made by mind.” Claude says, “Mental phenomena are preceded by mind, mind-chief, mind-made.”

      Gil Fronsdal (2018) has:

      All experience is preceded by mind, 

          Led by mind, 

          Made by mind.

      His version employs the open typography and plainspoken diction of modernist verse to offer a valuable perspective on the ancient text, which is dense, formal, and abstract.

      I cannot do better than Fronsdal (or AI), but I can explore alternatives. For example, what if we tried to make the English mnemonic?

      In advance of whatever we find is mind. 
      The mind is in charge; it makes the mind.

      Or what if we expanded each Pali word into several English counterparts, to indicate its range of meanings?

      Things, or what we experience, the truth--
      What comes before and is responsible
      For all this is the conscious stream. Mind is 
      The chief and what's foremost. Mind is mind-made.

      The next verse begins with the same four Pali words as the first one, but to repeat my extended translation of them would become tiresome. So I could make that line more concise, and continue:

      Mind comes before all experience and truth:
      If the mind is serene and bright, then ease
      Follows like a shadow that will never depart.

      By the way, I am not sure I agree with this text. If you suffer pain because of an injury or violence, I don’t think it’s all in your head. Nor does a serene mind inevitably bring ease; the eternal note of sadness rolls back in.

      This verse comes with a whole metaphysical basis that is worth considering but not necessarily correct. But it could also support some sensible ordinary advice: when something seems bad, you may be able to change your reaction to it rather than altering the thing itself.

      The text is the Dhammapada (v.1). I got help from both ChatGPT and Claude. See also: the fetter; The Tangle; This is beautiful, scolds the mind; on translation as spiritual practice; Caedmon’s Hymn and modern responses; and Mani Rao’s innovative Sanskrit translations (with a mention of Anne Carson).