Art, structures, and the professional associations

Today I went to a speech in my Civil Engineering School. The speaker was Raúl Escrivá Peyró ,a civil engineer who works as consultant in Navarra (North Spain). This speech was the first of a series about Aesthetics and Engineering, so he introduced the importance of express ourselves not only as engineers. Since we build beauty constructions too, we must express as artists too. The rest of the speech was about of Escrivá’s works and his personal evolution looking for the form since Functionalism to Minimalism: plane shapes, light and open spaces, nude structures: bridges, Navarra Parliament, pelota courts, and the most beauty warehouses I ever saw. I like organic structures, but I think Structural Minimalism has an interesting effect when contrasts with environment.

But the first Escrivá’s thoughts guided me to the question of professional associations. Recently, computer engineers in Spain are beginning to found any kind of professional associations as civil engineers and architects have. Yesterday I was talking with Emilio J. about this, and I must explain I’m not against a computing engineers professional association. Emilio said this is very important for computer engineers to have strong association to raise the perception of his profession, and to block down low quality intruders who work instead of computer engineers.“There must be a supervision of a computer engineer at least, to ensure a quality of the work”.

Today I understood Emilio’s conception and more computer engineers about their possible association is similar to architects associations: their main goals seem to be to block competences of the others, and try to expand their own competences. Meanwhile, civil engineers associations seem to expand our competences, and their spend less time trying to block competences of other professions. Our strength and reliabilty grows with the real fact each individual engineer can do “that x-thing” better than another professional (and, of course, being aware we can’t do “that y-thing” because another professional do “that y-thing” better), not with a paper that says we can do “that x-thing”.

So, if architect Norman Foster and sculptor Anthony Caro dare with the Millenium Bridge of London, and the bridge must be closed to the road because the bridge shakes as it happened, cut off the head to the stupid who hired him because not to investigate their real knowledgement about bridges and to trust in a paper.

I suspect this post will have any answer