The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. It is heard on national and local public radio stations. If you have it in your area, we suggest you tune in, as it always covers some engineering related topic of interest.

Just to peak your interest in listening to this wonderful series, here is a portion of an article on our City of Houston’s Transco Tower and its early Water Wall as covered in this fine series.

Skyscrapers are notoriously social creatures. They seem to have a herd instinct as strong as cows or sheep. They gather together to form skylines. That's why, when we first came to Houston and saw a building rising to the west of town, we didn't expect much. But this one kept going -- up and up.

By 1983, it towered nine hundred feet above us. It left us all gaping each time we looked its direction. Today, it's Texas' fourth tallest building, yet it still sits, alone. No other skyscraper ever joined it.  It is visible for over twenty miles by day and we all use it as a navigational beacon. At night a huge rotating beacon literally guides us from miles away.  As an art student, our Marketing Communications Director used to sit in the park and draw the building in three point perspective.

Transco, or Williams, Tower is more than just big; its neo-art-deco lines are really lovely. Small wonder -- the great architect Philip Johnson had a big hand in designing it. If it'd been built fifty years earlier, in New York, it would've been faced with stone. Now the same appearance has cleverly been wrought in glass. The stark vertical lines are actually vertical rows of windows angled outward. The building is one huge optical illusion.

There's more: The 64-story tower is really two buildings, one on top of the other. The upper floors are served by their own elevator banks from the first floor. The lower ones are served separately from a second floor lobby. We see no divide from outside, nor are we aware of the observation lobby on the fifty-first floor.

It has another feature that its more social skyscraper cousins lack. The building faces, not a busy street, but a three-acre green field, lined with live oak trees. On a Sunday afternoon students sit and read, a young bridesmaid poses for a photographer, kids play ball. It could be rural England.

At the far end of the green, a 60-foot, semi-circular Water Wall rises behind a triple archway. We stand with the water shushing at our back, and look at the Tower through one arch. It seems to race against the scudding clouds. Reality bends for a while.

If we tell ourselves that we've just seen the world's largest lone-standing skyscraper we blunt the moment -- turn it into a statistic. What really matters is the pure visual impact of standing so close to anything so large and still being able to see it fully.

Transco/Williams Tower eight miles away, standing above myriad large urban office and apartment buildings in the foreground

For more on this elegant building or to read other articles covered by The Engines of our Ingenuity, click here.