For the 99 percent of you who are not structural engineers, allow me to present an interesting, perhaps revelatory fact: there is steel in concrete. Yes, almost all of the apparent monoliths of modern construction<\p>--<\p>highway overpasses, the enormous piers of the new Bay Bridge, pesky parking garage columns<\p>-<\p>are actually composites of cured, pebble-infused goop and bumpy bars of steel.

This is for good reason. While concrete does have impressive strength on its own, it can only withstand forces in compression, and when its capacity is surpassed, its failure can be dangerously explosive. With the integration of steel, however, reinforced concrete overcomes these inadequacies to achieve awe-inspiring feats, like gracefully spanning 200-foot gorges and deftly dancing through seismic shakeups without giving way .

Perhaps some of you already know all this, and perhaps most of you don't really care. But please hear me out, apathetic know-it-alls<\p>--<\p>things are about to get metaphorical.

First, it may be surprising (and disturbing) to learn that I, a soon-to-be graduate of Stanford's Structural Engineering Masters program, was a little bit fuzzy about the steel-in-the-concrete concept just one year ago. As a freshly graduated architecture student, I was full of ideals, but somewhat technically inept. Four years of intensive doodling and getting glue in my hair had been fun, but despite many pensive all-nighters capped by naps in a pile of sawdust under my desk, I began to suspect I knew very little about how buildings stood up.

For example, my perception of concrete was quite different than that of my current engineering classmates, probably to a degree that would scandalize them. I didn't care about cement or aggregate or curing time or the ductility of post-peak behavior. I certainly didn't care about reinforcing steel.

Instead, like most architects, I was intrigued by the material's emotional properties: its solidity, its massiveness, its roughness and raw simplicity, its poetic sculptural capacity, its symbolism as an instance from a mold. My understanding of concrete and the physical world in general was like unreinforced concrete itself<\p>--<\p>authentically strong and formidable in some regards, but quite narrow in application, and prone to brittleness and crumbling at its limits.

I yearned for a better technical background, and so to my architecture professors' horror, I applied to engineering school. To my delight, Stanford accepted me. I won't bore you with the obvious details of culture shock and acute academic pain, but here's the obvious punch line of my metaphor: the past year of enlightenment has reinforced my formerly simplistic understanding of the built environment with a much needed steely resilience.

In my attempts to bridge architecture and engineering, two closely related fields that are nevertheless barely on speaking terms, I am continuously struck not by the supremacy of one over the other, but by the amazing, beautiful results of their occasional cooperation. Just as reinforced concrete assumes greater capacities than the sum of its ingredients, an appreciation for both the qualitative and quantitative wonders of the world allows us both to dream big and really make it happen.