Stark Beauty
Many regard it instead as a form-follower. As one architect told me, he designs the form, and the structural engineer finds the way to hold the architecture up. For a senior layperson like me, that’s a startlingly fragmented way of thinking, considering only three generations ago, our master-builders or maestros served all three roles of architect, engineer, and builder. On the other hand, I grew up in a time when structural walls, bracing, columns, and beams were always concealed by plaster cladding and ceilings—people didn’t care to see a building’s guts and bones—so this may have contributed to the perception that structure has little to do
