Customer Reviews

An Engineer Imagines

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Peter Rice was a genius behind modern landmarks like the Sydney Opera, the Centre Pompidou, and Lloyd's Bank in London. This british structural engineer gave our world a mighty heave to the future. He humbly sings throughout this book to his love of his work, to the greatness of human mind, and to the evolution of our understanding of materials and tools.

As an engineer in other media (software) who enjoys civil engineering and architecture done well, this book entertained and inspired me as few others in the last five years. Peter Rice appears to enjoy a risk, a change, a challenge. He listens to the materials to find solutions to problems, creating the practical engineering resolution to an abstract design. The newest tools, materials, techniques, talents are marshalled into the cause. But so is a spark of inspiration, an angle of attack.

The interaction of these words - risk, change, challenge, materials, engineering, design, problems, solutions - is described in a mostly auto-biographical tale. Each chapter centers on a project or two in which Rice was involved. Particularly fun was how working with the different people and cultures sometimes added to the challenge, and the result.

There is little doubt in my mind that any creative, design-centered profession can draw inspiration from this book.

Peter Rice is arguably the greatest structural engineer of our time. Loved by Architects like Renzo Piano for his innovation and consequently his ability to make their dreams come true. An inspirational book, parts of which reads almost like poetry. A very rare breed indeed for a book on engineering.

The austerity of the title and prose only bolster Rice's deserved recognition as a genius of our time. Rice looks back on his past projects and recounts them with a very unique combination of sensitivity and logic. A degree of sadness overcomes you when reading his remarkably sincere narrations, knowing that he wrote this in the final throes of his life.

If you have the funds to actually purchase this book, you won't regret it.