After writing last week about le corbusier, i decided i would actually carry on the architecture weekly posts, but incorporate civil/structural engineering feats as well as just nice buildings. and i was looking at some bridges yesterday, and thought about how great some of them are.

My favourite bridge that i’ve been on is probably the one leading up to chamonix in france, it’s not a very nice looking bridge, just loads of concrete, but it’s still quite a feat, it’s really high up and is twisting around the mountains and is over a load of factories.

or as a back up, there’s a great bridge over the reservoir near abbots bromley in staffordshire. i really quite like reservoir bridges, because they’re always really low over the water. and this is quite a long one over the middle of the reservoir, and in old stone. there used to be a village where te reservoir is now, but they flooded it to make the reservoir, which is quite a strange thing. imagine being moved out of your house so that water can be there instead.

The bridge that i most want to see is the millau viaduct, it looks like this:

which is pretty cool. it’s in france as well, and is really tall, but i prefer suspension bridges to ribbed deck ones by far. the towers are fucking massive as well, the tallest one is 343m, which is taller than the eiffel tower, it’s the tallest bridge in the world. and at its highest point, it’s 270m above the ground below. so the people fixing the cables to the top of that pylon must have been way over 500m in the air, that would be fucking terrifying. it was designed by norman foster (one of the world’s most famous architects, if you didn’t know), so that’s why it looks nice. it’s a shame it’s in the middle of nowhere in france, because i’ll probably never drive over it.

and obvious candidate for a great bridge is the golden gate in san francisco, designed by joseph strauss, my second favourite civil engineer (not really, i just wanted to quote pineapple express, even though apparently pineapple express is wrong, they say m. m. o’shaughnessy designed it, but he just came up with the idea, but i suppose it’s quite a funny name).  obviously everyone knows what this bridge looks like, but here’s a picture anyway:

it’s mental that that was built in 1937, over 70 years ago. although by then the skyscraper race had started as well, so it’s not too surprising. i think the main reason i love it so much is because of the film “boys and girls”, freddie prince junior plays an architecture student trying to get with the girl out of mallrats. it’s not a very good film, but i went through quite a long phase of loving shit teen films. anyway, he’s at college in san francisco, and just bangs on and on about the golden gate bridge, and always goes and sits and looks at it, which made me want to do that too. it also always looks really good in the sea mist. i really want to go to san francisco/california, so hopefully one day i’ll see it.

The most achievable bridge for me to see would be the blinking eye bridge in gateshead, so it’s in this country at least. it’s just a small bridge, for people to walk across the river on, but it tilts up to left boats pass under. not in the normal tilting way of splitting in half and lifting from each end, it just rotates around the middle, like this:

it’s just a great, modern solution to the problem, and looks really nice as well. it’s just a shame it’s in gateshead, obviously i’ve never been there, but it sounds like it must be a shithole.

When we went travelling around europe last year, we saw some great bridges, so here’s a quite sumarry of some of them:

The Rialto Bridge in Venice:

it was right next to our hotel in venice, and right where we got our boat from the airport to. it was really nice, but ridiculously busy in the day. we went there at night on the walk home from drinking one night, and stood there for about an hour, it really is a great bridge. jack nearly fell off, and we took pictures pretending to have a piss off it, it was hilarious.

Mostar Bridge:

this bridge is in mostar, in bosnia. it’s a great bridge, people dive off it into the water as a sport, even though it’s really high up. it was blown up the yugoslavian war, and then rebuilt brick for brick afterwards, which is pretty good. we were in mostar a couple of days before the big diving festival, would have been nice to have actually seen people jump, it must be so scary.

Charle’s Bridge in Prague:

this bridge is meant to be amazing, but i don’t really see the appeal. the main thing i liked was how there was three of four bridges similar to it up and down the river, sort of like in london near the houses of parliament. it was strange though, all the morons were just packing out the bridge, making it nearly impossible to walk across, but then we just went and stood on the bridge down river a bit. why stand on a bridge that is meant to look good, when all you can see is fucking idiot charicature painters.

Latin Bridge, Sarayevo:

this is a fairly unremarkable bridge, just a little car bridge over the river in sarajevo. but it is still an amazing bridge because it’s where world war 1 basically started. it’s where arch duke franz ferdinand got shot. it was really quite strange being on it, knowing that millions and millions of people died because of one thing that happened on that bridge about 90 years ago.

Dubrovnik Bridge:

this bridge is quite modern and snazzy, it looks like it’s just a bit of the millau viaduct has crashed into the side of the hill.

when we went down to somerset the other week, me, bonse and may played a “rate the bridge” game, i might start that game up again just on my own. it’s quite annoying that so much of my driving is motorway driving, they’re all just shit concrete deck bridges, occasionally with a shit steel bridge.