Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef wrote the following essay for the My Personal Compass initiative:

"He held up his forefinger in 1775," so say his friends, "and entered the debate." The architect of the Spanish Steps, Alessandro Specchi, knew that he had designed something that had the components of natural beauty — the structure, the grace, the carriage.

I read this and thought of my long-ago encounter with a tiny bug. It was also absolutely beautiful. A thorn, I thought, but it moved on the branch before my eyes. It was a perfectly camouflaged insect.

The Spanish Steps, thorn-like leaf hoppers, the structure of DNA, Bucky Balls — they all taught me that nature instructs us well about conceiving or building something that is fundamentally beautiful. Is beauty in the eyes of the beholder? Of course. But some things can be absolutely beautiful by design.

James Watson, when asked how he knew that the DNA model was right, could only say, "It's beautiful." Similarly, the Spanish Steps get people from the Trinita dei Monti down 110 feet to the Piazza di Spagna. But the steps also had to be meeting spaces for people from many countries, platforms for debate, and chairs on which to rest. They had to hold quiet places for friends and lovers.

To the casual observer the steps were "…a bewildering mix of curves, straight flights, vistas, and terraces…." But when the Scalinata di Spagna was finished, Specci knew the design was not just finished, it was complete.

One hundred seventy years later, Frank Lloyd Wright said gruffly when asked about the beauty of Fallingwater, "When it's right, you know it. Don't ask me to explain it." It was, as Wright described it, a matter of function. Wright admired Buckminster Fuller.

Fuller made a container, the geodesic dome, that was beautiful — so perfect that one wanted to bet that it would be found in nature. Eventually, it was. "I guess God made it," said Fuller. "I just rediscovered it." Others might have otherwise described the creator of naturally occurring, microscopic, cellular "geodesic domes" as a craftsman who had hundreds of millions of years to exhaust all errors. Who knows? But this was Fuller's truth — and Wright's: Define the need in its finest detail, then meet that need. Time spent on anything more was glitter, was wasted effort.

When he was 16 years old, Wright wrote in his journal a three-word phrase that would define his career, his notion of real beauty — "… form follows function." Later Wright said, "Form and function should be one, joined in spiritual union." The edict applies to ideas constructed in the mind, to theories and theorems, to anything built with the hand. Nature's lesson is simple — meeting every need of the function will define the form, and that form will be beautiful.

For details about the My Personal Compass Essay initiative, visit mypersonalcompass.ucdavis.edu.