A gradual refinement The steel rail is an artifact whose form has been carefully optimized. This gradual refinement of the design was done not by a single brilliant engineer but by more than a century of industrial evolution. The rail was never meant to be an object of beauty, but its cross section has all the elegance of fine typography. Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape elegancetypographytransportationevolutionchange
What the brick really wants. Michael Sorkin, Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know The material finds the right objectWe are working against the grain of the woodThe joy of the humble brick material