I have always loved communications towers. Whether they are radio transmitters or cell phone relays or airport control towers, these structures inspire my respect and admiration, for their appearance, their engineering complexity, and their importance to our networked society. When I was very young, I was fascinated by radio towers, some of which could be seen from our house. My parents, steeped in Freudian ideas, laughed at my childish devotion to what could only be phallic symbols. But that never crossed my mind, though a Freudian would say that didn't matter, since it was all in the subconscious. Well, whether Freud was right or not, that isn't what enthralled me about radio towers. This old RKO film logo is more like it. It combines the things I loved best as a child and continue to love now: the Earth in space, though backed by atmospheric cumulus clouds, the Eiffel-like radio tower, and the stylized lightning bolts flashing from the top of the tower, as well as the wonderful jagged-lightning typeface.

Communications towers resemble each other in their rigorous latticework structure of squares, rectangles, triangles, and trapezoidal braces, something which my reborn mathematical self appreciates even more than my young fantasy artist self. The only curved lines in the structure are at the bottom, as the lower supports flare out to gain more stability. In the RKO and the Eiffel tower, the flare is highly conspicuous, where in other, more recent towers, the parabolic curve is just noticeable, rather like the Yamasaki building at Harvard which I described fondly in a previous Electron entry (Damn! I can't find it! How can I make a pretentious self-referential link?). The TV and radio broadcasting towers were the tallest and the most graceful: narrow needles pointing into the sky, held stable by the long rigging of guy wires. At night, they blinked with friendly red lights, to warn aviators.

As technology advanced, telephone relay towers and cell phone towers and wireless communication towers sprouted in the landscape. These were sturdier and shorter than the broadcasting towers, but just as geometrically intricate. And they were ornamented, like Christmas trees, with a variety of instruments and antennas which did the real work while the tower was just the vehicle to raise them into the heavens. It is hard for some younger people to conceive of a time when there were no cell phones, but I still remember seeing my first one, in the hands of a businessman at a Metro station, sometime in the early nineties of the twentieth century. Cell phone towers are plentiful because they have limited range and the cell phones only work along "line of sight," so that if the tower is out of sight, you will have a hard time picking up the signal. As a result, the relays are everywhere and the higher they are, the more range they command.

They are the fortress and cathedral towers of our age, the heroic guardians of the hills and guarantors of civilization, for what could be more civilized than a peacefully maintained, intricate, instantaneous communications system? Wherever you go, if you see that friendly blinking light on top of a cell phone tower, you know that (if you are a cell phone user, and who isn't?) you are still joined to society, and to those who matter to you. And even as I write this, the Internet which you are reading this on is going wireless, so that those towers will bring you not only this Electron but your e-mail, news, sports, videos of all kinds, and "World of Warcraft." All brought to you through the towers which you drive by every day, hardly noticing them.

One of my most treasured books is a recent work by Brian Hayes, published 2005, called Infrastructure, just released in paperback. This wonderful book explains, chapter by chapter, with extensive photographs, the industrial features of our landscape both rural and urban. The book covers not only farms and factories and refineries, but waterworks, the electrical power grid, communications (and the towers), transportation, and waste treatment, as well as loads of other things related to keeping our civilization going. I'm using the word civilization again because these things, which I have loved since my childhood, are what make the difference between modern and pre-modern, order and disorder, even peace and war (for during war infrastructure is deliberately destroyed, or "degraded."). To paraphrase Ayn Rand, the poet of the industrial world, these are the "shapes of human achievement on earth."

And so in my art and in my writing and studies of math and science, I consciously choose to celebrate this world of engineering and function and making things work. As American artists such as Charles Sheeler knew, these structures have their own rigorous and robust beauty, even though they were designed without any consideration other than their industrial function. Here's the second in my current series of local scenes. Anyone who knows the urban environs of Northern Virginia will recognize this pair of landmarks. The tower hosts not only cellphone transmitters and microwave relays, but the faceted ball at the top houses a radar system for airplane navigation and weather reports. The round greenish shape at the tower's foot is a water tower. They are on the top of a hill which overlooks the entire area; the water tower, as Hayes explains in his book, is placed there so that the water will flow down into the urban pipes by the force of gravity. They are the modern version of the Trylon and Perisphere buildings which were the symbol of the 1939 New York World's Fair. Then, as with the RKO film tower logo, the creators looked toward a glowing, electric future. For better or worse, we are living in that future now.

Painting is ink and watercolor, with touches of acrylic, on illustration board. Dimensions are 11" x 9".

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