When one who died for Truth was lain

In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?

`For Beauty,' I replied.

`And I for Truth...the two are One;

We brethren are,' he said."

Emily Dickinson

A week had gone by since the evening with John Farland and his wife. It had been a time of adventure for me. Alice had taken me upon several extended flights in the air car. We had visited briefly at the university on Utah Isle and the architecture I saw there was beyond my most elaborate dreams of what could be done with structural principles. Instead of imitations of ancient architecture, or tiresome rectangular vertical projections of steel and concrete, or meaningless structures with facings and facades, there was an honest exposure of functional structural parts combined with graceful curves and decorative patterns from nature. Like the arches of ancient cathedrals, the structural parts were designed and proportioned to do what it appeared they did. Natural laws of physics with their mathematically constructed curves were given three dimensional form in these buildings. This gave structural members the grace of living things, like flowers, stems of plants, or ribs in the wings of a butterfly. The effect of this architecture was calming to one's spirit, perhaps like taking a walk in a forest of virgin timber. In their interiors an abundance of clear pools, fountains, tropical plants and rock gardens with little streams and water falls brought living natural beauty inside these buildings on every floor, purifying the air and perfuming it with the scent of flowers. To stand quietly in contemplation of such architecture was as satisfying as listening to a symphony. Alice said that to live with it was to daily grow more conscious of its beauty and more grateful for human cooperation and fellowship.

We had observed several structures that reached into the clouds when we journeyed over the continent. Some were reminiscent of the Eiffel Tower but breathtaking variations of it, rising to great heights. Even many of the smaller structures were so tall and light in construction that it appeared to me that they would be blown over by the wind unless they were anchored to massive foundations. Alice was pleased to see my keen interest and arranged to have a professor of structural design accompany us and answer my questions while we were at the university.

The professor, an unusual appearing man with almost transparent skin, hairline, wrinkles on his face and a large high forehead, was introduced to me as Dr. Dubrock. He was one of the `long heads,' the physically elongated people that had moved into the earth from a planet of another solar system. A delightfully pleasant person, he was able to make engineering principles seem like common sense. I questioned Dr. Dubrock about the tall structures I had seen with special reference to the foundations.

"Dr. Dubrock," I began, "in my time, one of the chief considerations in constructing a very tall building was the foundation design. New York City became a show place of tall structures because of its underlying strata of solid rock. Manhattan Island especially offered the necessary support for tall buildings. The structures were heavy and designed to resist overturning by any storm or quake. What new technique makes your light weight structures possible?"

"We merely studied the handiwork of Mother Nature," said the doctor, "and decided to learn how she designed her tall structures."

"You mean these buildings have roots!" I laughed.

"Yes, they do."

"How are they constructed?"

"Holes for root-like anchors are drilled in circular patterns. Depending on conditions, they may curve and fork and may have a bulb at the end for special anchorage. Sometimes we bore holes deep into subterranean rock. Generally, this design calls for a central high strength steel cable surrounded with concrete. This gives the effect of both a concrete piling and a root. You can see how this approach makes our tall structures practical."

"No, I can't," I said. "A tree may bend with the wind or quiver with an earth tremor but tall buildings are relatively inflexible. Our structural steel, while not brittle, had little elasticity and acted like putty whenever excessive stresses were imposed on it. The kind of tall buildings that we passed in the air car on our way from North Carolina could not have been constructed with either reinforced concrete or with structural steel, in spite of the roots they may have."

"Ah, yes, you are quite right, David," said Dr. Dubrock. "It was necessary to imitate Nature's flexibility as well as Her anchorage. Even before the shift of the poles, the materials and know how were available to design far more imaginative structures than were being built in those times. Design initiative was stymied by your political system which gave highest authority to the money lenders and enslaved the construction industry to serve shortsighted self interests."

"How could we have erected these tall flexible buildings?" I asked persistently.

"You have very high strength steel tension cables for prestressing concrete. These cables with a useful tensile strength of one hundred tons per square inch could have been employed to serve as the elastic tendons of a tall structure. You already had high strength concrete mixes which produced a crushing resistance of five tons per square inch. Using this concrete in properly designed prefabricated compression members, in combination with high strength steel cables for tension, an efficient and exceedingly practical design for a tall flexible structure could easily have been made."

"How would you load the concrete evenly enough to make use of more than a fraction of its great crushing strength?" I questioned.

"In order to load the entire cross section of a brittle material evenly, it must bear upon a plastic material that is confined," said Dr. Dubrock.

I thought about this idea for several minutes before I answered. "I think that I see what you mean. If one used individual struts of concrete, properly contoured and with suitable joints, assembled the segments with tendons of steel cable threaded through them and suitably anchored, we could design a flexible structural skeleton for a tall building. The elasticity of the high strength steel would cushion the shock of earth quakes or high winds and the concrete would be carrying only compression loads."

"Yes, David, it is a design principle from Mother Nature. We shall never equal Her efficiency, but we may imitate Her," said Dr. Dubrock.

"It is apparent that concrete is not used above ground for building construction any longer," I said, as I looked toward a large laboratory building nearby.

"Well," said Dr. Dubrock, "with our unlimited energy supply from cosmic rays, aluminum and glass have become the most plentiful building materials on earth. Aluminum is earth's third most abundant element, after oxygen and silicon. The power required for the electrolysis of the aluminum ore was the limiting factor and chief expense to producing it. Now glass from sand and aluminum from clay furnish our commonest building materials. In addition to the supply of aluminum, we have magnesium from sea water which contains a half million tons of it per cubic mile. Such raw materials are unlimited and a minimum of human exertion is required once the machinery is set up to produce them. Scientists of your time were in the process of developing glass far tougher than had been considered possible a few years earlier. Now glass has qualities of elasticity unequalled by the finest steel."

"Marvelous, marvelous!" I was delighted. "Limitations that once throttled the imagination of engineers are simply non-existent. Glass certainly provides the most beautiful and enduring building material I can imagine. It used to be structurally worthless because of incompatible expansion rates and brittleness. By using a confined plastic material like pure aluminum in joints between glass structural sections designed for compression, and braided glass filament cables for tendons to hold the structure together, an engineer could design a crystal palace or a suspension bridge or an Eiffel Tower."

Alice was delighted with the way Professor Dubrock enlightened me concerning engineering techniques. My limited knowledge of engineering seemed like a child knowing his abc's compared to an educated citizen's, like Alice. She could have given me the same discourse as the professor, I learned later, but wished to spare me from becoming more conscious of my inferior education. The university professors' task was primarily to develop the students' abilities to imaginatively apply knowledge. They had been relieved of teaching students the fundamentals, I was informed by Alice. Knowledge of engineering principles was introduced into the mind quickly and easily, she said, by hypnotic techniques. When I raised my eyebrows at this, she said we would discuss it one evening with her father. The casual mention of engineering education by hypnosis opened a new area of thought to intrigue me. I remembered experiments teaching languages that were remarkably successful.

With the arrival of the weekend, I wondered what new experience awaited me. Arrangements had been made to bring John and Amy Farland back for an evening but changes in plans interfered. I was disappointed. The discussion of gravity and cosmic power was planned for the evening and I had resolved not to lead the conversation into other subjects again.