What do writers hang on their walls? Here are two items on my office wall, along a profile of our cat, who looks like he's checking for dust on the frame.
These are two of six illustrations by Paul Breeden for my first article in Smithsonian Magazine, "Engineers Versus the Eons," March 1984.
Paul's Facebook is linked here.
My article speculated on what would happen to three great American structures if civilization collapsed and they were abandoned to the ages, as the Ancient Wonders of the World were. The painting on the right depicts the South World Trade Center tower having collapsed due to rusting in the basement.
That was based on an interview I had with Les Robertson, the WTC's chief structural engineer. He said that, assuming failure of the PATH tunnels or heat exchanger lines allowed the basement to flood with brackish water from the Hudson, those massive steel columns would rust and eventually fail.
I explained it this way: "Rust is nature's way of returning steel to iron ore by combining it with oxygen. Oxygen is richest at the tidal zone, where water rises and falls daily."
The illustration on the left imagines a collapse of the Gateway Arch following a tornado. The Arch's engineers told me that a break would most likely happen at the 300-foot elevation, where the concrete-stiffened lower section of the structure meets the stainless-steel-only, hollow upper section. After hundreds of years of no maintenance, corrosion of the stainless steel would grow into cracks, making a weak point.
