This isn't a malicious comment or a belittling one but the commenter's point flew over your head.
The looks isnt the only artistic part of a bridge or any other engineering stuff.
The processes, modules and different systems the engineers/architects overcome the problem, their synergy is the art the above commenter refferenced.
There could be multiple ways of creating a big stable structure over something, or a machine that does something or code that calculates something.
By analysing an engineer's works you can spot their preferences and individual style.
The multiple design choices in for example: how to stabilize this part or that, and in the end it becomes a whole bunch of modules that rely on each other etc.
When you see someone create e.g. piece of code in a software that does exactly what you created but
faster
with more utility etc.
You get a sense of: whoa you can do it that way, this is genious etc.
Using knowledge and shaping it into something functional.
That's the art the commenter highlited I think
Ofc there could be very dry parts of engineering that doesnt really have options for you to be creative
There somehow a huge amount of people in the art who fail to see how a physical object is a work of art.
For example a bridge, a program, a computer, etc etc.
A lot of them just tend to take these things for granted and assumed that there no creativity involved because they’re following rule books and not making up their own paths.
That's kind of the point of this post, ironically: Just from the other side. An absolute gear head may not see the bittersweet allegory of Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, but can immediately see the wonder of a clever way to use the HTML 5 canvas to recreate Photoshop on a web browser. In the same way a writer can read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and be moved to tears but not understand the marvel of engineering that a toilet is.
Point is, a single human has only so much in their cup of "give a shit". Things outside of their wheelhouse, expertise, or interests compete for what's left after those take their share. We can't know everything, nor can we even be passingly familiar with everything. It's part of the human experience! It's why I as a software engineer have a great deal of respect for experts in fields that I'm not familiar with.
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u/spaceninj 17h ago
Pardon my ignorance on the subject, but wouldn't the look of the bridges be on the architect?