Bridges
Bridges are paramount to the structure and infrastructure of this world. The world is ridden by gaps and chasms. Fissures, ruptures, clefts. Rifts. Gulfs. Crevices and cracks. Fractures and clefts. Even our language has a hundred words for divides.
Every terrain is ridden by rivers. There are rivers that connect and rivers that divide. Rivers that are good for navigation and rivers that freeze, becoming obstacles. Such rivers, as any chasms, should be crossed.
And yet, and yet… If I know anything about this life, it is that we should strive to build bridges instead of making partitions or divides.
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The variety of bridge architecture is diverse and fascinating. Not a very intuitive thought, but bridge engineering is an exercise of almost unlimited creativity. Because there are literally dozens of ways to build a bridge.
There are lifting bridges and air line bridges, cantilever and transporter bridges, suspension bridges and drawbridges. There are bridges made of iron, bridges shaped like sinusoids. Bridges that move in directions you don’t expect them to move.
Anyway, below are ten bridges I was lucky to see in my life, with my own eyes.
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1. Bridges From Childhood Dreams
First of all, there are bridges you grow up with. They leave a permanent trace in your psychology and occasionally return to you in dreamscapes. Guy Debord and Iain Sinclair called it psychogeography: the idea that a landscape leaves a permanent footprint on one’s psyche…
I grew up in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. A city of two rivers and many great bridges. Some estimate the number to be as high as 43, the Metro Bridge and the Bor Bridge being the most famous ones.
On the outskirts of my hometown, there’s another bridge though that’s especially surreal. It’s named the Sartakov Rail Bridge.
Seeing it through the car window on the way home from my grandmother’s house was one of the first childhood wonders I remember.
The Sartakov Rail Bridge is a brutalist bridge, a bridge made of raw concrete. But it’s also biomorphic, organic, kind of bestial. Its iron ridge spirals like the spine of a dinosaur fossil under the weight of rushing freight trains. The bridge goes over one kilometre and consists of four spans covered by hingeless arch ribs, each 150 metres wide.
If this bridge could be compared to anything, it mostly resembles a needle that stitches together two shores with a thread of concrete and steel. Or maybe a phrase written in italic handwriting.
And to make it even more unreal, this enormous brutalist structure stands in the middle of the vast emptiness of the austere Oka River landscape. Very Russian.
2. Bridges of Steel
When fissures are wide, one needs a solid material to bridge them. And what’s even more solid than concrete is steel.
There are many fascinating steel bridges in the world. The Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Astoria Bridge in Oregon are just a few examples, impressive in their heaviness and scale, with kilometres of railway tracks on thousands of tonnes of metal.
But the most impressive steel bridge in the world, I have no doubt about this, and no one should, is the Forth Bridge near Edinburgh.
The Forth Bridge is a cantilever bridge that crosses the Firth of Forth. It weighs 50,000 tonnes and features 6.5 million rivets holding it together above the muddy, silty bed of the river. It’s also a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has been called ‘Scotland’s greatest man-made wonder.’
The Forth Bridge stretches for 2.5 kilometres, and there’re rumours that when a crew of painters finishes repainting it in red, they have to start all over again. Red bridges seem to carry a certain bloody, morbid quality in them. The Golden Gate Bridge is a notorious spot for suicides, while more than 70 people died during the construction of the Forth Bridge in the 1880s.
As if taken from a Peter Greenaway’s film, the historical records preserve a detailed catalogue of these deaths:
Of the 73 recorded deaths, 38 were as a result of falling, 9 of being crushed, 9 drowned, 8 struck by a falling object, 3 died in a fire in a bothy, 1 of caisson disease, and the cause of five deaths is unknown.
The Forth Bridge has a dreamlike, haunting quality to it, and it’s not surprising that there’re entire books dedicated to it. Such as The Bridge by Iain Banks. It’s a novel about a man with amnesia who finds himself in a surreal civilization of people inhabiting an enormous, never-ending bridge. They never leave it and know no outside world beyond it. He’s trapped there too, with the bridge serving as a kind of limbo somewhere between the past and the future.
Apart form Banks, Alan Turing used the Forth Bridge as a subject for a test of AI’s creative abilities (‘Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge’), while the biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson used it to illustrate the load-bearing principles underlying the skeletons of vertebrates in his biology book.
3. Bridges That Are Undecided
Some bridges seem unsure of their function. They’re supposed to connect, but what they do instead is play hide-and-seek, changing their minds halfway through. Midway, they decide to disappear.
The Øresund Bridge crosses the strait between Denmark and Sweden. It connects Copenhagen and Malmö, and it’s literally a bridge into nowhere. The Øresund Bridge disappears halfway through the strait and turns into a tunnel.
Supposedly, the bridge was designed this way to avoid interfering with air traffic at Copenhagen Airport, which handles more than 600 take-offs and landings per day.
It’s not the only bridge of this type.
The famous Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macao Bridge, the pride of Chinese engineering, is a very similar project. It’s a bridge that connects Hong Kong with the mainland China, and disappears under water somewhere in the middle of the Pearl River Estuary to avoid obstructing air traffic at Hong Kong International Airport.
To my regret, I haven’t seen this one with my own eyes (yet). On my last day in Hong Kong, I chose to go to the 石澳泳灘 beach rather than explore the miracles of Chinese civil engineering.
Where do the tunnel-bridges go? Into the depths of the Baltic or South China Sea, or into the netherworld? Do they pierce the Earth’s crust to emerge at the other end of the globe? Does the Øresund Bridge start in Copenhagen and end in Hong Kong? Can you reach Macao from Malmö?
4. Bridges As Obstacles
Bridges are meant to connect, and yet sometimes they obstruct the routes. Their opponents are rivers, and rivers are used for navigation. A common solution for letting ships and boats through are the standard drawbridges, like those in Amsterdam or Saint Petersburg, which lift and split apart to let vessels pass through.
But what if, instead of making a bridge draw its parts, we built… a bridge of impossible height?
One such bridge is the Vizcaya Bridge in Getxo, Basque Country. Built in 1893, it’s the world’s oldest transporter bridge, connecting the banks of the Nervión River.
The Vizcaya Bridge is located 13 km north of the Port of Bilbao. To allow maritime traffic to pass without obstacles, it was built to the height of a 20-storey building. Instead of a typical roadway, it gives pedestrians two options: either to walk on a pathway 45 meters above the water level or to board a gondola suspended by a framework of cables, which carries both passengers and cars across the river.
It’s a puente colgante, a hanging bridge, or a transporter bridge. It’s slow and it’s weird. Sometimes a bridge doesn’t passively provide you with a path to cross, it makes an extra effort to transport you to your destination by itself.
It’s also the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in Spain recognized specifically as the industrial heritage landmark.
6. Bridges That Don’t End
We’re used to bridges having a beginning and an end. But what if some of them don’t? Dreams never end. And neither do bridges.
If you fly to New Orleans from the direction of Miami, you may be flying over Lake Pontchartrain. The lake is vast, still, but what’s more fascinating is that there’s a road that cuts straight across it, running through the middle of the water and, from a bird’s-eye view, seemingly never-ending. This is the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway.
The causeway is, in fact, not one bridge but two parallel bridges spanning almost 40 km and connecting Metairie and Mandeville in Louisiana. It takes about half an hour to cross. Somewhere in the middle, you lose sight of the shores. The causeway stands on approximately 9,500 concrete pillars and is considered one of the longest bridges in the world.
A thousand miles southeast of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway lies another, similar construction: the Overseas Highway in the Florida Keys. I’ve been there once, and it felt surreal. The highway has a length of over 170 km, starting at the southern tip of Florida and ends somewhere half-way across Cuba, going along the waters of the Atlantic. There’re mysterious-sounding places along the way: Jewfish Creek, Sugarloaf Key, or Fat Deer Key.
Once, this route used to have rail tracks known as the Overseas Railroad. However, it was destroyed by a series of devastating Caribbean hurricanes and storms, and never really restored.
7. Industrial Heritage
Some bridges serve their function. Others are preserved for their beauty.
Chicago is famous for its many heritage bridges, which symbolize the city’s industrial past.
Among them are the city’s numerous bascule bridges, or drawbridges. One example is the St. Charles Air Line Bridge, built in 1919. It was once the world’s longest and heaviest single-leaf movable bridge. Its enormous steel span rotates upward around a fixed horizontal axis. Despite its immense weight and sheer size, the St. Charles bridge was once even moved to a different location, when the city of Chicago (much like the Soviets around the same time) decided to reroute its rivers.
Another impressive Chicago bridge is the Canal Street Railroad Bridge. It features a gigantic steel structure that rises vertically between two towers, lifting an entire railway span to let the ships pass.
Opened in 1914, the bridge remains in railway service today. Its main span can be raised to a height of 34 metres in just 45 seconds. Weighing approximately 1,500 tons, it was once the heaviest span of any vertical-lift bridge in the US.
Today, it is the only vertical-lift railway bridge still in use across the Chicago River.
8. Bridges That Coil Like Snakes
In the southern part of Tokyo Bay, between Shibaura in Minato City and the artificial island of Odaiba, stands a weird construction made of a suspension bridge, an expressway, a road, and an automated railway. It has a very proper name: the Tokyo Rainbow Bridge.
But my favourite part of this enormous engineering project is the Shibaura Loop, a circular ramp that lifts traffic up to the Rainbow Bridge. For instance, the automated Yurikamome train climbs about 30 metres along the loop, gaining elevation without having to go through an excessively steep incline.
Inside the ramp, there’s an island: Shibaura Anchorage (芝浦アンカレイジ). It’s full of boat ropes and scrap. I’ve always thought that if William Gibson’s The Winter Market took place in the real world, it would most likely have a spot like the Shibaura Anchorage as its strange post-apocalyptic location.
9. Dramatic Bridges
Bridges connect shores. Low and high. Urban and wild. And when a bridge covers particularly rugged terrain, it can make the landscape look even more dramatic.
One such example is the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, which crosses the River Avon. Back in 1864, the British Admiralty decided that any bridge over the river had to be at least 100 feet high to allow the passage of tall-masted warships to Bristol Harbour. In the end, they built the Clifton Bridge, which turned out to be not 100 feet, but 100 meter high!
The sandstone used for its towers was transported from a quarry in Leigh, while the iron came from South Wales. Today, the bridge and its massive towers look almost like an organic part of the rough rocky landscape.
Why do bridges appeal to us? Not only do they link, unite, and connect, they also symbolize a route to elsewhere, however dramatic or strange.
In Zoroastrianism, there is the Bridge of Chinvat, or the Bridge of Judgment, which separates the world of the living from the the world of the dead. For the righteous, it is broad and easy to cross, but for the wicked, it is narrow and easy to fall from. Similarly, in Islam, there is the bridge of Ṣirāṭ, which the dead must cross on the Day of Judgment. It is thin and sharp and spans over Hell.
In any case, a bridge is a metaphor for many things.
So let us build our bridges solid and stable, and let us cross the chasms of hell and the chasms of separation, however deep or dark they may be.
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Bonus Content
If the 10 bridges above were not enough, here are a few more. The list of great bridges goes on and on. I’m glad I haven’t seen them all yet, because that leaves something to look forward to in the future and not kill yourself now.
For instance, there are many more impressive steel bridges in the world. As already mentioned, the Sydney Harbour Bridge is particularly cool. It’s the tallest steel arch bridge in the world.
Or the Astoria–Megler Bridge in Oregon, a steel cantilever through-truss bridge (???), one of the longest of its kind, which sinks down to the river’s surface halfway through.
Some bridges go not above but below the water level. One such example is the Moses Bridge in the Netherlands, near the Belgian border. It’s a ‘sunken’ bridge that parts the waters, and because it is built below the water level, pedestrians seem to walk through the water rather than over it.
There’re some bridges that carry flows of rivers. The bridges not for trains, cars, or pedestrians, but for ships and boats.
The Magdeburg Water Bridge in Germany is an example of such bridge. It’s literally a crossroads of two rivers, or a navigable aqueduct.
A similar principle is at work at the Falkirk Wheel Boat Lift in Scotland. Except that it not only connects two canals, the Forth and Clyde Canal, which runs between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde, and the Union Canal, which runs toward Edinburgh, but also lifts boats between them. Since the two canals differ in height by 24 metres, the Falkirk wheel serves as a boat lift, raising and lowering boats through a fascinating rotary mechanism: a giant, mechanically balanced steel wheel.
Some bridges are not static but movable.
For instance, the Scale Lane Footbridge in Hull, England, is an apostrophe-shaped pedestrian swing bridge that rotates horizontally to allow river traffic to pass. It’s the first bridge that allows pedestrians to remain on it while it moves!
Another way to build a movable bridge is to lift a section of the road and then lower it back into place. The Slauerhoffbrug (Flying Drawbridge) in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, is a bascule bridge that uses a single pylon to lift a section of the road vertically, then putting it back.
To be continued…