My degree program puts me in classrooms at many of U.C. Berkeley's colleges. This semester I happen to be enrolled in a Transportation Policy and Planning course that led me into a book that led me directly back to my prior musings on awe.
Karen Frick, author of a new book on the subject, spoke on the history of the construction of the new Bay Bridge, and particularly on the arguments over the new bridge's aesthetics and meaning as a key part of the formal decisionmaking process. During the course of the lecture, she mentioned David Nye's American Technological Sublime (1994), which just sounded cool to me. So I picked it up and read it.