Art is not necessarily painted, molded or framed. It is sometimes sprayed, poured, and covered with the ground that we are strolling on. The buildings which support our cities and our scenery have a silent grace--bridges, tunnels, foundations, conduits which were not made to be seen, but to last. Their symmetry and endowing purpose contain within themselves something of art, which we pass over unnoticed.
We tend to divide art and engineering, construction and creativity. However, the boundary between the two is thinner than we could assume it to be. The same principles that control the one who makes a sculpture balance, form, proportion and rhythm, are the same ones that control the one who builds an engineer's work and makes it to stand the test of time and the weather. In such an encounter of force and majesty, submerged art comes out.
The ancient painters had realized that geometry could be poetry. Since the pyramids of Egypt to the arches of Rome, mathematical accuracy has been a basis of aesthetic harmony. The absence of curves, simple lines, and repetition bring to mind order, a visual rhythm, willful and timeless.
This geometrical clarity remains supreme in contemporary infrastructure. Geometric logic is the logic behind the timeless design of the structures that transport water under roads, under bridges, or form the landscapes. They may look simple in their form, but every measure is precise, every angle intentional. A calculation of engineering turns out to be a kind of visual composition, one which expresses a mute language of balance and power.
In minimalist sculpture, a form of sculpture, even though the sculptural piece is buried beneath earth or concrete, it still maintains the same artistic balance. It is beauty minus embellishment - art that is present in accuracy as opposed to embellishment.
Concrete is one of the few materials that have completely revolutionized construction as well as art. When it was viewed as the pure utilitarian, it has become the preferred medium of architects, designers and sculptors who appreciate its unrefined honesty. Concrete does not deny its real nature but it displays its texture, its weight and its flaws with pride.
The play of light on a cured concrete surface generates a changing palette of colors and shades. With the passing of time nature leaves its mark, and the rain darkens its hue, the moss smooths its lines, the sunlight mellow basks its features. Here in this changing surface we find the dialogue between nature and human creation which was always the aim of great artists.
This aesthetic potential is present even in the smallest functional structures, such as the drainage systems, to small concrete box culverts. Their clean geometry, harsh texture, and silent presence make it happen that they are inadvertent sculptures in the landscape blending in the same way as the natural environment that they contribute to maintaining.
Contemporary art glorifies simplicity. The minimalist movement has taught us that meaning is not something that has to be embellished, sometimes it is within the simplicity of form. The same is true of the design and infrastructure world.
By definition functional structures are minimalistic. They are deprived of redundancy, especially of what is unnecessary. But it is this restraint which makes them so quiet. The light and shadow effect in a passage of underground or the repetition of the rectangular shape in a highway threshold reflects the conscious simplicity of the modernist design.
It is an art that is not created by wastefulness, but is created with a reason in mind, beauty found in accuracy, economy, and conciseness.
We are immersed in a whole world of artistry, which we live in without even noticing it. The mellow shape of a bridge, or the rhythmic spacing of the tiles on a wall, or how the water will run in a channel underneath the road, etc., is the working out of design thinking, of invisible human thought put into shape.
Art, however, is not confined to what we admire, but it is also present in what we depend upon. Each building that quietly does its duty gives a sense of stability to beauty and it is on top of which life is ever graceful.
A sculptor may be at marble, an engineer at function, carving with equations, balance, and vision. The aim of both is the same, which is harmony.
Functional design is a partnership between human sight and nature when designed with relaxation. The manner in which water follows a channel, the shadow cast upon a face of concrete, or the air rushing through a vent,--all these are little reminders that utility and art are not antonyms.
The artificially created and the organic live side by side in this partnership. The engineer manipulates the environment to control nature in a soft manner, and not to overpower it. The painter as well is pursuing this harmony, the recognition of natural rhythms of the world and the way we can dance to them.
Next time you cross a bridge, or a smooth graded path, or a silent hole in the road covered with a culvert, stop and contemplate what was in the head of him who planned it. These unacknowledged forms, which are infrequently praised, frequently unseen, are as much a creation of man as anything in a museum.
They make us understand that art is not just in the gallery or great designs. It may reside beneath our foot, within the vigor of concrete, within the orderliness of structure, within the silent endurance of shape. Beauty prospers anywhere purpose meets precision and this is whether it is a cathedral ceiling or the elegant geometry of small concrete box culverts.
That is the art of concealed structures--where architecture is poetry, and purpose is form.
