These days when the cream of elite students channel directly to lucrative fields of finance and law, I’m intrigued by the self-made character who allows an overriding interest to bloom and shape his life’s work. Paul Cartwright, a man in his 50’s, has always been fascinated with physics-- tensile strength, compression, the power of an arch, heat transfer, &c-- the building blocks of how things work. Architect of marine installations, municipal piers, homes, inventor, industrial engineer, city councilman, I’ve known him for about ten years, and every time we speak he has an entirely different project under his belt.

No fancy office, staff, or large promotional budget, he brainstorms from his studio in Camden, Maine. His solutions exhibit great elegance of design and function, are built to endure long term, warm the lives of the families and workers who live with them, and have been green long before the present awareness.

Years ago he already built a house heated and cooled for a fraction of conventional cost because it draws on geo-thermal wells that tap into soil consistently 50 degrees. Fans circulate that cool air as AC in summer. When it’s bitter outside, the same circulating air need only be heated the small increment above 50°. He coaxed the family to positon their eat-in kitchen in a south facing ell because that’s where a family naturally settles, and it must be sunny, cozy and inviting in the Maine chill. Further, their kitchen garden, sheltered by the ell, would grow twice as fast. He even laid a simple underground tube to a brook upstream to bring a free little burbling fountain into it.

Once when I called he was busy making a working paddlewheel boat, which a friend needed for a film he was shooting. The next time he was devising an ingenious steel aquaculture cage that could be dragged out to the deep sea (where such farming causes minimal environmental damage), then spring into shark-protective fullness at the pull of a cable.

The project I had the pleasure of watching most closely, however, was a long pier to deep water on an island coast pummeled by powerful wind, waves, and chunks of ice in winter. Mr. Cartwright explored the site himself in a wet suit, and proposed a bold steel arch springing in one span from the stone headland to a single 14” steel column bolted to bedrock undersea 100 feet away. A little side leg would lock the column upright and sheer any ice crashing into it with the current.

Mr. Cartwright, another skilled builder, and an expert welder constructed the entire structure by hand. They bent to form the huge steel members that came extruded and rolled to order from Bath Ironworks by means of simple “come-alongs” (hand held winching devices) rather than enormous machines, and pinned them into place with an elegant array of welded rods.

When construction was completed two months later, they hoisted the entire enormous structure onto a little barge (it extended heart stoppingly 30 feet over either edge), waited for a mirror smooth sea, floated it 12 miles to site, positioned it precisely over its readied supports at high tide, then let the receding waters settle it perfectly to be bolted in place.

Mr. Cartwright’s audacity from start to finish thrill me: the bold live design, his practical solution to very difficult circumstances (the bridge presents only the slimmest face to savaging elements), the human scale of manufacture, the stunning delivery and installation, the pier’s strength and permanence despite an almost lacy visual lightness. And this is only one of several long elegant piers he’s built, each completely different in stance and effect one from the other.

When I asked him where he’d taken his architecture degree he said he never had. He’s just an inventor who loves the strengths of physics and the elegance of visual form. Code, the tensile attributes of materials, newly emerging concepts—one can learn and keep abreast with from books and trade literature. The rest becomes apparent with experience and intellectual curiosity. If need be for an official permit or circumstance, one can pass the plans by a licensed colleague to examine and sign off. Such freedom of direction and self sufficiency take one’s breath away.