I’ve had a bit of a fixation on architecture as a concept for the past few months. I am an engineer, to my very essence according to my sister (who admittedly is far wiser than I am). My job has always been to make someone’s dreams come true according to a wishlist they give me. That wishlist never has the line item “make pretty” on it. I’ve always had a bit of regret that I am not one of those lucky people who are tasked with providing beauty to the world; my world consists of making things that work, full stop. But it is precisely for this reason that I got enamored by architecture: here’s a group of people whose role is to make structures that not only work but also, by some metric, are required to be aesthetically pleasing. It’s an interesting prospect, and one that instilled some deeper questions inside of me. We ask the building to be beautiful, but seldom do we ask the factory to be beautiful. Why?

Gas Works Park Tours - Book Now | Expedia — They can be beautiful when they’re not factories anymore, though.

I am blessed and cursed to have relatively easy access to answers for these questions: I am enrolled in graduate school. It takes about two emails to get a kind professor to open their office to gently explain to the curious idiot how their world works. And in the midst of explaining how the burgeoning architect learns aesthetics and balances their dreams with the realities of physics, I was presented with a statement that gave me pause: many architects do not consider themselves to be artists at all. That was a bit shocking to me, you guys make pretty things! They do not have to be pretty, but you make them that way regardless. Surely that is an invocation of some kind of art?

I have also become painfully aware that I have not had a single unique thought in my entire existence. This is a topic that has been hotly debated for as long as humans have been making buildings. But the explanation for why architecture cannot be considered art that stuck with me the most comes from a sculptor. The architect cannot be the same as an artist because “Art is purposely useless.” The theory goes that if it serves any purpose other than feeding your soul with inspiration, it isn’t art. The architect builds a structure that provides a place to do things. It can’t be art. I don’t think it matters if I agree with this statement or not, it is undoubtedly an extreme position. But it is one that I find useful for the following reason: we don’t need art to survive, but we do need it to make the world in which we live bearable.

I lied a bit earlier; I actually do get to make things look cool. But it’s not my job, it’s just something that happens once in a while. Often, when the boring engineer builds something, we are presented with a few choices that perform identically. Guess what is almost always the final point that decides these cases? It’s which one looks the coolest. That’s the deciding factor. It’s one of my favorite parts of my world because under all the math and physics, under all the rules that bind our universe that we had no part in picking but must conform to regardless, there is still a place to be human. I’ve seen so many stoic, brutally logical engineers turn into absolute children, hotly debating what the right way to make their thing look cool is. You seldom see more passionate conversations out of some of these people. It almost feels like this is exactly why they entered the job in the first place. And, to some degree, I really think it is.

I’ve come to think there’s a little artist in all of us. There’s some artist in the engineer, there’s some artist in the architect, there’s some artist in the artist. In the world we live in, where brutal pursuits of productivity and metrics are the end-all and be-all, I am really trying to remember this. There’s a part of all of us that wants, yearns for, needs to create things for no other reason than it feeds the soul. We have flung space probes to the very depths of our solar system; we still stuck art on those. We will never see them again, but we did it anyway. One of the things that makes us human is to leave little marks on the world that prove that we were here, that we matter. They don’t need to last; sometimes it means more if they don’t.

Voyager Golden Record: Through Struggle to the Stars | Smithsonian Music — And not just any art; we literally etched Beethoven and Louis Armstrong on a golden record and gave the aliens coordinates just in case they were trying to listen to more.

I saw a video on Instagram the other day of a type of sand art that is practiced in the region near the border of China and Tibet. It’s a truly painstaking craft, literally moving individual grains of sand to make an incredibly intricate pattern. But, at the end of the video, I remember thinking two things: that’s gorgeous, how are they going to preserve that? Epoxy and glass might do it.

If you watched the video, you will learn that preservation is not what happens. The sand is swept away, this video being the only proof that such a thing existed. In the past, we would not have even had that. Sometimes you’ll see a piece of art that affects you. This was one of those for me. There is something so honest and warm about creating something that is inevitably doomed to disappear, yet respecting it nonetheless. It made me think about the things I make. The rockets I get to work on will one day burn up, explode, get scrapped, or otherwise. My research work has a contracted mission life of two years. It’s a time span that has always felt ephemeral to me. It’s a position I’ve begun to reconsider.

Everyone has seen those videos that describe the scale of the universe. The ones where it shows how big the Earth is compared to the sun, and the sun compared to some bigger star, and it just keeps zooming out until you feel this foreboding sense of insignificance in the grand scheme of it all. In a different lens, we all feel like insignificant cogs in the machine these days: people seem to care less and less about each other, so why does it matter at all? I think everyone in the history of existence has felt this to some degree, in some capacity. I certainly have on occasion. It’s one of those questions that defines human existence. I posit the following idea: you, I, and everyone else are all art.

We don’t owe anyone any grand explanation for why we do what we do. We don’t have to check any boxes that show that we provide some benefit or return. We don’t need to justify our existence. We get a short, fleeting time on this rock that we all share. In a world that tries to make you a factory: rigid, cold, and unyielding, remember that we are all more like sand sculptures. In the grand scheme of things, I think the nihilist is right: nothing matters. But they forget that, paradoxically, doing things in spite of the guaranteed ending of it all is precisely why what we do can mean so much. The engineer doesn’t get paid to make their things look cool. The architect still has to add plumbing in their building, but they choose to make the bathroom beautiful. The artist makes things even though they aren’t contributing anything that feeds anyone. But we do it anyway.

I think the artist in all of us is the part of us that wants to remind the universe that humans exist despite it all. We are all just moving grains of sand around before the wind comes. We’re all sending golden records into a void that may never listen. And it is the most noble thing we can do. The factory demands we keep the line moving, but the artist asks us to pause and look at what we’ve made. Don’t be afraid of the wind. The fact that we will be swept away doesn’t make the pattern any less beautiful. In fact, it’s the only reason it matters at all. So I’m gonna keep making my spaceships and calling them art. I promise I’ll make them look as cool as I am able.

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