Engineering IS Art

Here's a pretty cool story.  My alma mater, MSOE, is building an art museum on campus:

MSOE is constructing a full-blown art museum on its downtown campus - complete with curator, exhibit manager and a permanent collection of 600 European and American paintings, prints and sculptures that date to the 16th century.

Ahead of an Oct. 20 opening, workers last week installed the steel-frame dome that crowns a four-story atrium entrance at E. State St. and Broadway.
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What makes the art so valuable to MSOE, Viets and Grohmann concur, is its single unifying theme: work and workers in hundreds of manifestations.

Among the oldest pieces are canvases that show primitive Flemish iron smelters and old German foundries, dark and dramatic with flashes of hot orange ingots. The collection covers a gamut of realism, impressionism and expressionism - glass blowers and miners; sweaty muscles in blast furnaces and pastoral images of farm fields; railroad yards and stone quarries.

Of course I'm a little biased, but I've always considered engineering to be art.  It is the art of taking cold scientific knowledge, and combining it with craftsmanship, in order to create a useful object for the real world.  Quality engineering is something you want to have in your home, and use every day.  It's a stainless steel toaster that you don't put in your cupboard when you're not using it.  It's an iPod (or iPhone) which you proudly wear on your belt.

Engineering is the art of combining form and function to make everyone's life better.  A good piece of engineering is a thing of beauty to behold.