An Engineer Imagines.

By Peter Rice. London: Artemis. 1994. 37.50 [pounds].

The autobiography of the late Peter Rice is a book he had long planned to write. A book about engineering that, as the preface states, `would not be a textbook about how to solve technical problems, but a personal account of the joy and enthusiasm he took from his profession'.

Through the book one is able to learn of his childhood in Ireland, the influence of his mother and father and the church (for a time he wanted to be a priest) and the accidental manner in which he went first to study aeronautical engineering, and switched to civil engineering because he couldn't stand the place in which the former was taught.

The book gives one a sense of the enormous support of Peter's wife and family and an understanding of his respect for Ove Arup who he refers to as `my father in engineering' and who was already `The Old Man' when Peter joined Arup's in 1956. Ove would have been 61. From this point it traces Peter's life, through jobs such as the Sydney Opera House, Beaubourg, Hoyds, Mend, a car project with Fiat, the Pavilion of the Future at Seville and finally The Full Moon Theatre (a theatre lit by the full moon focused by moving mirrors).

Through these projects we can appreciate the role Peter played as the engineer working with many of today's great architects. In some respects it is curious to note the architects he does not mention, and ponder why such a wonderful project as Stansted should only be referred to in the chronology of projects, and the Mound Stand as a passing comment.

There is a chapter on Jean Prouve, a member of the jury of the Centre Pompidou competition and a great supporter of the scheme, whom Peter calls `one of the great natural engineers', and a chapter on the role of the engineer. The latter elaborates on Peter's now famous reference to the engineer in the role of Shakespeare's Iago. This goes further to reinforce the basic nature of the innovative engineer, which Peter modestly perceives as just the result of being `intelligent, or sensible'.

Throughout the book there are clues to an understanding of the engineer's role, a role which in every respect, Peter was comfortable in leaving to others to find out about. There is, however, one further, possibly subliminal clue to this philosophy. The book opens, quite extraordinarily, with a colour photograph of cowslips, and closes with Robert Frost's poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Perhaps Peter is also willing us to read Robert Frost's poem, The Tuft of Howers, which concludes:

`Men work together,' I told him from the heart,

`Whether the work together or apart.'