# Engineering and Sculpture Circa May 2002, I just got my first job as an all-rounder in a very small, family-owned tech company located on the other side of the city of Buenos Aires—a 1.5 hours commute from home in Quilmes—and I am taking the train early to get to San Martin where this company has its offices. As the train slowly rolls out from Retiro station and lazily heads West, I can see some sculptures next to the tracks. A giraffe, huge insects, and what seems to be a giant humanoid. Every day, and for the following two years—the time I lasted in the job—I would appreciate these intriguing sculptures time and again. In time, I would eventually learn that these pieces of art were made by the late [Carlos Regazzoni](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Regazzoni), an insanely underrated artist who, for years, created metallic creatures out of old, rusty railway scrap material. I recently came across an interview with Regazzoni from 2014, where the journalist asked him: > _J: Do you first sketch something?_ > > _CR: No, when it comes to sculpture, I play with space and I feel it before it’s done. Then, all that's left is just to build it._ > > _J: From where do you start?_ > > _CR: From the most difficult part._ And when the journalist inquires if he could teach about art, Mr. Regazzoni adds: > “_Art can’t be taught. But it can be learned.”_ Twenty years ago, as my inner engineer was blooming, I started to realize how much of the engineering design work is, in a way, a form of sculpting. Creating technical artifacts from scratch is very connected to sculpture. There might be techniques, methods, recipes, and standards, but at the end of the day, there is a lot of _feeling_ in it. Go find a book where you can find “good architectures”. There isn't any, at least any of good quality. Just as you can’t find any books on how to write a good song, or make an eye-catching giant steampunk ant. That can’t be taught. But it can be learned. A decent systems engineer must feel the architecture before it’s done. Then, all that’s left is just to build it. Such _feeling_, as abstract as it may sound—and we engineers are not fond of abstractness—is the result of trying things on and on, and a lot of “playing with space”. Regazzoni’s art heritage includes a piece called “The Improbable Vehicle” (see below), which I find especially attractive. It looks beautifully precarious and absolutely incapable of going far without falling apart. Regazzoni purposely felt it that way, and—thankfully—built it. It is what it was meant to be.  > [!Figure] > Carlos Regazzoni's Improbable Vehicle # From Potential To Action Imagine you are in the beautiful Tuscany, in central Italy; more specifically in [Carrara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrara). And, for whatever strange reason, you are looking at a raw marble block. Could there be a particular sculpture already existing in it, but only as a possibility? Aristotle wrote approvingly of such ways of thinking and thought about a type of causation in nature that is often ignored in scientific discussion: the potentiality of things. Aristotle differentiates between potentiality and actuality, or potency and action, as one of several distinctions between things that exist or do not exist. Aristotle defends the existence of inactive powers (or capacities). In a sense, a thing may not exist, but the potential does exist. Consider, for example, a piece of wood, which can be shaped into a table or a bowl. In Aristotle’s terminology, the wood has (at least) two different potentialities, since it is potentially a table and also potentially a bowl. The matter (in this case, wood) is linked with potentiality; the object (in this case, the table or the bowl) is linked with actuality. His idea is that a piece of raw wood in a workshop can be considered a potential table since it can be transformed into one. But transforming raw wood into a table requires certain skills, therefore the potentiality of things and the knowledge required to convert them into actual things show an inescapable relationship. A piece of wood next to me—if we considering my abilities as a hand-crafter—has considerably lower probability of becoming a table compared to the same piece of wood next to a capable carpenter. Complex systems are realized in not such a distant manner compared to the wooden table, or the sculpture out of a block of marble. There are the raw materials and the skillsets on one side (the potential), and we must put it into action to transform it into something that can work, and work well.