Structures- Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

by J E Gordon

  Though the great majority of structural accidents are sordid back-street affairs which we hear very little about, there are, of course, a certain number of great dramatic accidents which, for a while, monopolize the headlines. Of such a kind were the Tay bridge collapse in 1879, the capsize of the Captain in 1870, and the R101 disaster in 1930. These are very often intensely human and intensely political affairs, caused basically by ambition and pride. The sinking of the Captain was of this nature: the two men who carried the heaviest moral responsibility paid heavily for their faults, the one with his own life, the other with that of his son. Unfortunately a great many other lives were lost too.

  The wreck of the airship R101, which hit the ground and was burnt out at Beauvais in 1930, was basically similar. There is a splendid account of this by Nevil Shute in his book Slide Rule. The immediate technical cause of the accident was the tearing of the fabric of the outer envelope; this fabric had apparently been embrittled by improper doping treatment. The real reason for the disaster was, however, pride and jealousy and political ambition. The Labour government’s Air Minister, Lord Thompson, who carried the ultimate responsibility, was burnt to death in the accident, along with his valet and nearly fifty of the crew.

  Nevil Shute’s account of the events leading up to the accident corresponds extraordinarily closely in character with my own experience of rather comparable circumstances. One can at once recognize a certain atmosphere of Gadarene inevitability about the whole procedure. Under the pressure of pride and jealousy and ambition and political rivalry, attention is concentrated on the day-to-day details. The broad judgements, the generalship of engineering, end by being impossible. The whole thing becomes unstoppable and slides to disaster before one’s eyes. Thus are the purposes of Zeus accomplished. People do not become immune from the classical or theological human weaknesses merely because they are operating in a technical situation, and several of these catastrophes have much of the drama and inevitability of Greek tragedy. It may be that some of our text-books ought to be written by people like Aeschylus or Sophocles – these writers were not humanists.

  * * *

  * Arnold, 1966.

  † Each ‘tour of duty’ for an airman in Bomber Command consisted of thirty sorties or operational flights. Such service was therefore exceptionally dangerous. The loss of life in Bomber Command was comparable to that of the German U-boat crews, which was notoriously high.

  * The extra 20 per cent was required by the airworthiness authorities so as to cater for variations in the material and in the assembly procedures.

  * An act of God has been defined by A. P. Herbert as ‘That which no reasonable man would expect’.

  † Bread upon the Waters (published in The Day’s Work).

  * She died of T.B. at the age of twenty-seven. What she actually did was more intelligent and much more seamanlike than one would infer from the popular stories and pictures.

  * Except, of course, the engine-room bulkheads.

  * K. C. Barnaby, Some Ship Disasters and their Causes (Hutchinson, 1968).

  Chapter 16 Efficiency and aesthetics

  -or the world we have to live in

  ‘ Why don’t you have Mr Smith in your Cabinet, Mr President?’

  ‘I don’t like his face.’

  ‘But the poor man can’t help his face!’

  ‘Anybody over forty can help their face.’

  Told of President Lincoln

  Once upon a time I used to work in an explosives laboratory. Naturally very thorough precautions were imposed by the authorities against the entry of unauthorized persons, who not only might sell stolen explosives for a large profit, but might equally well blow the whole place up. Thus this establishment was ringed with barbed wire and alarm bells and armed guards and police dogs and with nearly every device that the ingenuity of security officers could think of.

  Now many practical explosives are based on nitro-glycerine, which, by itself, is an exceptionally dangerous liquid both to store and to handle. The least undue familiarity, such as shaking the bottle, may cause it to detonate with the most appalling results, Ordinary safe explosives, such as dynamite, contain a large amount of nitro-glycerine which is only rendered safe to handle by the addition of various substances that have been developed over the years by a succession of rather brave scientists, such as Abel and Nobel. Those who have to experiment with straight nitroglycerine need to take the most fantastic precautions, and the dangers are such that they not infrequently suffer from nervous breakdowns. Not only are nitro-glycerine laboratories physically separated from other buildings by earthen embankments and wide open spaces, but the staff often wear special clothing, including a peculiar kind of boot devised so that they may tread softly and build up no electrical charges, let alone anything so dangerous as a spark.

  One week-end some of the local children managed to wriggle under the security fence and to evade the police and their dogs. Finding themselves in an apparently lonely place, they broke into one of the nitro-glycerine laboratories. There was, however, nothing very much there to interest them, so they upset the various bottles and beakers of nitro-glycerine on to the floor, stole a couple of pairs of special boots and escaped, by the way they had come, undetected from that day to this.

  This is a true story; but I rather think that it might also serve as some sort of parable, for it is possible that engineers and planners and bureaucrats and do-gooders and all the company of the avant-garde are like children playing in a shed full of nitroglycerine – sublimely unaware that they may cause a major explosion. It is all very well to concentrate on ‘efficiency’ and making things work, and of course, it is necessary to meet material needs – though in fact our material needs are more flexible than we like to think. However, people have subjective needs which are more important and much more likely to lead to social explosions if they are abused or neglected.

  So, when I listen to some of my engineering colleagues talking, I sometimes shake in my shoes. It is not only that they regard the aesthetic consequences of their work as of quite minor importance but that they regard concern about it as basically frivolous. Yet I think that the more we increase material prosperity, the more serious in the long run will be the ultimate catastrophe if people cannot find aesthetic satisfaction.

  When I was an engineering student I used to escape from my classes, panting for air, and creep guiltily to the local museum. Many a mathematical lecture did I cut, spending the time looking at the pictures in the Glasgow Art Gallery. No doubt pictures in museums do help, but in a way such things are a pathetic necessity, a refuge of desperation, not only from the aridities of analytical lectures but, more important, from the all-pervasive ugliness of towns like Glasgow.

  Of course it suits the tidy philistine administrative mind to keep ‘art’ in separate boxes called museums and theatres, and it is noticeable that the brave new 1984 regimes provide not only pictures in galleries but also music and ballet. But such forms of ‘fine art’ can only operate occasionally in the ordinary person’s life. They may provide an escape, but they are really no substitute for an environment which is satisfying in itself and is continually present. Most of us find some sort of refreshment in the countryside, but we are pretty well resigned to the dreariness of towns and factories and filling stations and airports and most of the things with which we have to spend our day. Possibly fish which have to live permanently in dirty water may get more or less used to it – but human beings who are conditioned in this way ought to rebel.

  We ‘Compound for sins [we] are inclined to/By damning those [we] have no mind to.’ And, as Professor Macneile Dixon once said,

  ... contrast the middle centuries, that unique period in our European annals, with the centuries following upon the Renaissance. How different their respective views of the world, how opposed their systems of belief! Yet in each the doctrines universally held are felt as inevitable, as unassailable. Each age thinks itself in possession of the true and only view possible for
sensible man.*

  Thus, about the important things, each age has a totally closed mind. Nowadays, being materialists, we are duly horrified that our ancestors were prepared to tolerate physical poverty and to inflict physical pain. But these same ancestors would be just as horrified that we should suffer many millions of people to experience every day the beastliness of London or New York; and that those who work in our Dark Satanic Mills should have to be well paid to put up with noise and ugliness which are largely unnecessary. Even the ‘clinical’ decor and atmosphere of modern hospitals would seem to them to add a new terror to dying. Therefore many of us seek some kind of relief or consolation in ‘Nature‘ and we escape, when we can, to the country, because we find the countryside more agreeable than towns and roads and factories. Many people indeed believe that Nature is in some way inherently beautiful and, perhaps, in some way inherently ‘good’. Taken to the extreme such views lead to something very like Pantheism – to Meredith’s Woods of Westermain. But it seems to me that, if we can only get rid of our romantic prejudices and really look at all sides of the question we are forced to the view that Nature is just as aesthetically neutral as she is morally neutral. Mountains and lakes and sunsets may be beautiful, but the sea is often menacing and ugly, and, so far as I have experienced them, primeval forests are frequently places of horror. Most of the European landscape is not really ‘natural’ at all. The kinds of plants and trees which are allowed to grow have been carefully selected and controlled, and many species have been artificially bred to their present forms, just as much so as the domestic animals. The patterns in which the plants are grown, the whole lay-out of fields and woods and hedges and villages – not to mention drainage and land improvement – are the result of human choice and effort.

  Before the eighteenth century, when most landscape was much wilder, educated men had a dread of ‘Nature’, which implied to them not only physical discomfort, but Pan in the raw. To these people it was the towns which were habitable and attractive, the country which was inhospitable and ugly. Today, when we admire the lovely English landscape we are really admiring something which was deliberately created by the civilized and intelligent English eighteenth-century landlords.

  If the country has gone up in the aesthetic world, the towns have certainly come down. Nowadays when we deplore English towns and factories we are deploring the product of philistine reformers and engineers and architects and businessmen and the little grey men who sit in council offices and the bigger grey men who sit in Parliament. Of these people’s sins, it is not enough to say that they know not what they do; for we do that which is inherent in our natures – as Plato well knew. It is at least arguable that the countryside is more attractive than the town not because the country is more ‘natural’ but because town and country were made, by and large, by very different kinds of people. But the first thing is to see ugliness for what it is rather than accepting it as part of the natural order of things.

  We do that which is inherent within us. In a world which has an unreasonable admiration for reason we are apt to forget that the human mind is rather like an iceberg. The rational part of our minds, of which we are conscious, is quite small, and, like the visible part of the iceberg, it is supported from underneath by the subconscious mind, which is much larger.

  At this point I am only too acutely aware that we are reaching a stage in the argument which is the province of artists and philosophers and psychologists and that I am miserably qualified to blunder into regions where the angels of art criticism fear to tread. I can only plead that necessity knows no laws, that the modern man-made world is hideous, that sheer desperation induces me – a naval architect manque – to stick my neck out, I think it is really important that some sort of view of the aesthetics of technology and engineering and structures should be put forward to engineers and technologists by one of themselves, however inadequate that view may be. For what follows I commit myself to Athena and to Apollo – by their grace may somebody more competent than myself be provoked into doing the job better.

  Let us begin by looking at the human reception process in aesthetics; that is to say, why we react as we do to some inanimate object. Within the subconscious mind there lies an enormous store of potential reactions and ‘forgotten’ memories. This material is partly inherited genetically from a remote past (Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’) and partly acquired by the individual himself during the course of his own life, mainly from apparently forgotten experiences – sometimes unpleasant ones. Now our physical senses – sight, hearing, smell and touch – continually pass to our brains far more information about our surroundings than our conscious mind can accept or be aware of. But the subconscious is monitoring this information all the time and it is full of receptors and trip-wires which are liable to be influenced by every shape and every line, every colour and every smell, every texture and every sound. We may be totally unconscious of this, but it is happening all the same and it is building up subjective emotional experiences within us – be the effects good or bad.

  This sort of process may account in some measure for the way in which we are influenced, subjectively, by inanimate objects and especially in the present context by artefacts. Artefacts are made by people and somebody, at some stage, has some sort of choice in the shape and the design.

  It is impossible to make any object without making a series of statements in the process. Even a straight line is saying in effect ‘Look, I am straight, not crooked.’ Even a very simple artefact contains a package of such statements which have been made by people.

  Just as there can be no such thing as a totally objective experience, so there can be no such thing as a totally objective statement – one with no emotional connotations of any kind. This is true whether the statement be made in words or music or colour or shape or line or texture or in what engineers call design.

  This brings us from what might be called the ‘aesthetic reception process’ to the ‘aesthetic transmission process’. In other words, how do things come to be designed as they are? What is it that the maker or the designer puts into an artefact which causes it to have the aesthetic effects which it does? The short answer is, to a large extent, ‘His own character and his own values.’

  Thus whatever we make and whatever we do we nearly always leave upon the thing or upon the action the imprint of our personalities, written in a code which can usually only be read at the subconscious level. For instance our voices, our handwriting and our manner of walking are quite characteristic and are usually difficult to disguise or to imitate. But this sort of thing extends much further than these familiar examples. One dark evening I was in a yacht anchored in a remote Scottish loch. Round the corner of the land, three or four miles away, there came another sailing yacht which I had never seen before and of which I had no knowledge. Though it was quite impossible to recognize her name or her crew I said to my wife ‘That boat is being sailed by Professor Thorn.’ And so she was – for the way in which a man sails a ship to windward is quite as individual as his voice or his writing, and, once seen, can hardly be forgotten. In the same way one can often tell which of one’s friends is flying a light aircraft, for the manner of flying shows, unmistakably, the imprint of the character. In the field of painting and drawing, even the work of very amateur performers is apt to tell one more about themselves than about their subjects. Again, it requires exceptional skill to imitate really plausibly the work of a particular artist. Naturally there is no sharp line between painting and drawing and technological design, and almost everything that gets made is likely to carry with it something of the personality of the maker.

  What is true of individuals is also apt to be true of a society, a culture or an age. Archaeologists can usually date artefacts, such as potsherds, within a very few years on ‘stylistic’ grounds. If you walk around Pompeii and Herculaneum, you will come away with a quite surprisingly powerful sense of what sort of people the inhabitants were. This has little or nothing to do with th
e technology of things like the plumbing, and it is something which no amount of factual history can convey. So far this sort of pattern recognition has eluded the computer; long may it continue to do so.

  Recently, I was drinking canned beer with a much respected colleague. I said – rather unwisely and priggishly, I suppose -’Really a thing like this beer-can seems to me to epitomize all the dreariness and commercialism that is wrong with technology nowadays.*

  My much respected colleague was down on me like a ton of bricks. ‘I suppose you want to sell beer in pitchers or wooden barrels or wine-skins or something. What else would you sell beer in in this day and age except tin cans? How stupid and impractical and reactionary can you be V

  But, with respect, my much respected colleague was missing the whole point. It is not what you do but how you do it that matters. Beer containers are not beautiful or ugly because of the material from which they are made, or even because they are mass-produced. Whatever they are made out of they will convey, unavoidably, the values of the people who are responsible for them. We happen to be a society which is unable to make attractive beer-cans. Indeed we are, I fear, an age rather noticeably lacking in inherent grace and charm.

  Greek amphorae were beautiful, not because they held wine and were made of clay, but because the Greeks made them. They were, in their day, simply the cheapest containers for wine. If the Greeks had made tin beer-cans perhaps we should now have collections of classical beer-cans in museums, much admired by artists.

  I believe that very few artefacts are intrinsically ugly or beautiful simply because of their function*; they are rather mirrors to an age, to a set of values. Rather the same conditions obtained during the eighteenth century as in Ancient Greece – partly no doubt because it was a classical age which consciously modelled itself on the ancient world. Nearly everything the eighteenth-century craftsman touched was elegant. This was not just a matter of the luxury trade; it extended right through society.