Sometime near the start of my academic career, I identified the George Winter Award as an honor that I might hope to someday qualify for.  My whole career has been premised on the notion that the arts and humanities inform engineering as much as science and technology, and I have somehow been interested in both areas of knowledge. A very brief sketch of my career, and my progression into academia may help to explain. I began my education at the University of Michigan, School of Architecture, and spent three years of a six year program before losing interest and leaving school-on leaving school, I traveled and took a succession of ordinary jobs, before starting to work as a structural drafter and becoming interested in structural engineering. In the meantime, I was also taking art classes in night school-on the strength of my drawings I was re-admitted to architecture school to complete an undergraduate (non-professional) degree in architecture. Following that, I completed an M.S. in Civil Engineering, both degrees from Washington University.  For the following seven years, I worked as both an architect and as a structural engineer, and earned licensing in both fields. I earned a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Washington, completed a one-year post-doc at the University of Nebraska, and began an appointment in the Department of Architectural Engineering at Penn State University in 1992 that has continued to this day. If there is a theme to this summary, it might be indecision, or better, a continual dialog between the humanistic and artistic, represented by Architecture and the scientific and technical, represented by Structural Engineering.

While I was working in practice, I had to keep deciding whether I was going to function as an Architect or as an Engineer-sometimes on a project by project basis, sometimes in choosing employment. One of the merits of my academic career has been that I no longer have to make such decisions. In my teaching, I am able to bring in topics from architecture, from philosophy, and from other humanities and in my research, I have collaborated with architectural historians, philosophers, architects and other engineers of similar outlook.  My research into the practices of medieval architects, and nineteenth century engineers has shown that technology, natural philosophy, art, and natural science are almost seamlessly merged during these time periods, during the middle ages by master builders and the churchmen that employed them, and in the nineteenth century by engineers such as Augustus Jay Du Bois, who also engaged in philosophy.

In addition to recognizing the meaningful engineering outlook that the previous ages have maintained, I have found a similar thread of the effectiveness of an outlook that embraces science, technology, philosophy, and other humanities: the purpose of engineering, as with architecture and the humanities, is to enrich civilization and the lives of people: the more that practice is unified, the more enriching the practice becomes.

As I advise my students, both in architecture and in engineering to understand and to embrace the humanities and their relationship to our field, I suggest the same to any practicing engineer who wants to be effective and to be understood.  Engineering is meant to serve humanity, and in this, engineers need to understand humanity, as expressed through history, philosophy, art, and art history.  The study of these topics is enriching to anyone, especially to engineers. 

By: Thomas E. Boothby, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASC

Winner of 2019 George Winter Award

Dr. Boothby's suggested reading list:

These books from philosophy present an alternative narrative to the science that we are taught in school, and informs the modern approach to engineering. The list is in chronological order.

• Sextus Empricus: Against the Physicists
• Vitruvius: The Ten Books of Architecture
• David Hume: An Enquiry into Human Understanding 
• Alfred North Whitehead: Science and the Modern World
• Paul Feyerabend: Against Method
• Nancy Cartwright: How the Laws of Physics Lie

These books were instrumental in forming my own ideas about aesthetics.

• Vitruvius: The Ten Books of Architecture
• E. E. Viollet-le-Duc: Dictionnaire Raisonné de l'Architecture Française du XIe au XVIe siècle

A small selection of books illustrating the scope of structural engineering in the nineteenth century.

• George Fillmore Swain  Structural Engineering, esp.  Volume 3 Structural Analysis, Graphic Statics, and Masonry
• Augustus Jay Du Bois: The Strains in Framed Structures
• Augustus Jay Du Bois: Elements of Graphical Statics and their Application to Framed Structures
• Karl Culmann: Die Graphische Statik