If you’ve walked into Engineering Hall lately, you’ve likely seen “the Wall”. Along the eastern side of the building, already strained by the construction nearby, a dirt shortcut once carried entire classes of engineers to their lectures, discussions, and labs. Then, one late-September morning, it happened. The shortcut was suddenly sealed off by an unsightly metal fence and foreboding signs ordering us to “use the official path”, a route that would take over a minute longer to navigate. And while many other students would shrug that off – a minute longer? So what? – to us UW Engineers, every minute shaved is a step closer to perfect optimization. Engineering, after all, exists solely to make our lives more efficient, whether that means building a massive bridge to cross the largest of gorges, or just making my daily commute to ECE 551 a smidgen faster.
Now, another tragedy here is the steel sculpture trapped in the middle of the old shortcut; it’s an AISC Steel Sculpture, which teaches various framing and connection techniques to civil engineers but has been cut off by the fence. The College could have paved around it, highlighted it, or even relocated it to make room for both its function and form. But instead, the new fence puts it behind these literal metal bars like a museum artifact!
It surely isn’t the first time the College has traded bits of its unique personality and storied past for its new vision of concrete. Remember the Founder’s Fountain? It was once the defining symbol of the College of Engineering, but its recent demolition and removal were without any ceremony. I’ll have to start 3D-printing CoE nostalgia if this continues!
Still, we engineers are nothing if not adaptive. Like water finding the path of least resistance, we’ll always find the fastest route. You can fence off the shortcut, but not our indomitable spirit of optimizing everything. The College should embrace this flow as its students already have, rather than fighting it with fences and reroutes.
College of Engineering, tear down this wall… before the class of 2030 builds a tunnel instead!