Brian Brenner’s semester at Tufts, where he teaches bridge engineering, is coming to an end. That milestone doesn’t mean that he will have very much more free time because he still will be a principal bridge engineer of Tighe & Bond, based in Westfield, Mass. I wondered if school’s end would allow Brenner’s mind a little more time to roam freely across the landscape of design, construction and life. If he wanted to, Brenner could post a blog or two about buildings, for example.
Not a chance, says Brenner. “We refer to buildings as vertical bridges,” he quipped. That declaration was a sign that Brenner, a 59-year-old product of Rockland County, N.Y., and graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was unlikely to take a more serious view of the human condition. As the author of three humor books published by the American Society of Civil Engineers, Brenner employs a deadpan silliness to illuminate the odd corners of life and engineering. And he isn’t so hopelessly preoccupied with bridges that he doesn’t sometimes take up travel, technology and popular culture. For example, in a recent post on ENR.com, Brenner describes his use of Google’s street view to take a virtual tour of Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. Up until then, Brenner says he was “profoundly ignorant” of Nuuk and “never really wanted to visit before.”