A Tale of Two Bridges

Bridges around the world have been considered physical and symbolic connectors of places, communities and cultures. By finding the cross connections between the physical and symbolic meanings associated with the bridges, we explore the idea of the bridge in two ways – the manner in which its identity is rewritten over time and the process by which the bridge, in return, starts to hold a value of its own. Constructed with the basic premise of establishing a physical connection between two points, the (river) bridge very often turns into a 'place' – over time, its weaves itself around stories and becomes a narrative of the past that is yet to be. In this innate quest, whereas very often communities are united and bonds are built, sometimes bridges stand to become the image of the divide as well. In both cases, however, the use of the bridge evolves and it ceases to be 'just a bridge'-it becomes an interactive zone for people visiting it, passing by and crossing it as daily commuters, squatters, hawkers or even a stage or backdrop for social and cultural celebrations/ festivals. In this paper, we take an in-depth look at two bridges in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India – the Purana Pul on the river Musi in Hyderabad (erstwhile Andhra Pradesh) and the Prakasam Barrage on the river Krishna near Vijayawada (in the present day Andhra Pradesh). Through these two examples, we explore the how our relation to the past changes with time and how these bridges have become the canvass for reflecting the changing political identities and iconography – it depicts the nature of the people and their orientation to grasp on to the past or remain in the present.

R. AMOÊDA, S. LIRA, C. PINHEIRO (ed.), REHAB 2017, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Preservation, Maintenance and Rehabilitation of Historical Buildings and Structures (Braga, 14-16 June 2017), Green Lines Institute for Sustainable Development, Barcelos 2017, 2017

Building bridges has always been one of the most inspiring technological and engineering challenges for the constructors of our cities, but its role in connecting physically divided places has immediately become a metaphor for the building of deep relationships between different contexts or even cultures. Over the centuries, the opportunity to deny the passage to enemy troops has made the destruction of this element a “privileged” instrument of war, but the ability in creating a cultural caesura in communities has significantly increased its power. Therefore, the destruction of a bridge, especially if deliberate, does not represent a mere break, but it can be regarded as an inner wound that needs to be healed. It can turn out to be a symbol of rebirth, a strong possibility to re-establish the thread of continuity between different peoples and, broadly speaking, also between the past and the future.

This article explores the relationship between the thinking, feeling, moving body, and a city’s industrial architecture. It takes as its fieldwork site the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and 59th Street bridges that dominate downtown New York, and uses this to present an ethnographic understanding of lived experience as a continuous sensory exchange between mind, body, and world. New York’s bridges, towering 300 feet into the air and 7,000 feet across, established a new sense of scale against which citizens could compare their finite, organic bodies. The article draws upon a practice-based research project, New York Stories, for which I recorded more than a hundred interior dialogues of random strangers as they moved around the city. People’s movement across bridges, reveals them to be complex sites of perception, sensation, and experience, which generate ongoing streams of interior dialogue ranging from the trivial to the tragic. For when walking across a bridge people are no longer attached to the land or part of the city but are instead partially in the sky above the water, “making strange” the sense of being on the ground, and subjecting people to various delirious effects including vertigo, flying, and falling, before reaching the other side. It is a story told through words and images in the form of a photo-essay with accompanying text that derives from the practice-based ethnography that is also available in video and audible form online.

2011

This article is a critical review of the conventional wisdom on bridge aesthetics. If bridge design is to be recognized as a valid and distinct means of artistic expression, then bridges must reflect the truths that define the fundamental essence shared by all works of art, regardless of the medium of expression. By extension, for these truths to be embodied in bridges, their existence and importance must first be acknowledged in the conceptual frameworks used by designers to guide their decisions in the design process. A fundamental attribute of the essence of art is to challenge existing ideas, and hence to defy dogmatic notions of how to create art works that are in "good taste". The conventional wisdom on bridge aesthetics, however, is actually nothing more than such a set of dogmas. These include: (1) Form Follows Function (structural efficiency is a sufficient condition for aesthetic significance), (2) The Customer Is Always Right (art is not created by artists, but by the public), and (3) Architects Do It Better (the discipline of structural efficiency and the expressive potential of the flow of forces are irrelevant). The works of Maillart, Roebling, and other masters of bridge design show that designers need to be free from such dubiously founded restrictions to create works of artistic significance.

The paper discusses an important issue of designing footbridge structures located in urban areas. They can give their location individual characteristics, with a favourable psychological and social impact. Especially a pedestrian bridge may serve as an element of new cultural values. It may give an individual character- genius loci- to an otherwise rather plain location. In the article there are presented well-known examples from the history such as the residential bridge over the River Thames in London and the Ponte Vecchio on the Arno River in Florence. They are set against modern footbridges such as the New Millennium Plaza in Graz, EXPO'08-Bridge Pavilion in Zaragoza and designs of multifunctional bridges for pedestrians. They indicate the direction of future development of this kind of engineering objects in a city. New tools for designing together with digital technology have transferred the work of bridge designing to a higher level of space and material arrangement. The paper describes processes through which ecology, culture, technology and building are united to create an area of complex relations. Thus new effects of strong impact are brought to life, which results in a change of perception of the interrelations between Man and Nature and Culture.

This online collection considers bridges not merely as structures but also as important visual cues and metaphors: they join what is separated; they increase communication; they facilitate circulation; they are social and cultural constructions, as well as feats of engineering. Please see: http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/learn/explore/collections-themes/not-just-bridge-works-museum-collections

Bridges serve several functions but the main is of course to cross an obstacle and get to the other side. Bridges are often treated as an indicator of progress and engineering skills as well as a symbol of the economic potential of a city, region or country. This is why many urban bridges have become the most important structures in the cities. The paper discusses several examples of bridges that have a significant impact on the perception of the city or even the change of terrain configuration.

Nexus Network Journal, 2005

Topology, as its name indicates, is a (mathematical) way of conceiving of TOPOS: the place, the space, all space, and everything included in it. Jean- Michel Kantor evokes a few examples of forms and spaces which should be stimulating for all those interested in the concept of space, architects in particular. In topology, we no longer distinguish between two figures, two spaces, if you can pass from one to the other by means of a continuous deformation–with neither leap nor cut. Knots are a simple way of escaping from the obtuseness of space. Modern techniques of visualization developed for the military or for the Hollywood studios of Lucas Films can integrate the deformations on computer screens: the continued deformations of surfaces are discretized, that is, they are replaced by approximations produced at fixed intervals, then filmed in video. The time of the virtual corresponds to the era of topology, and architects are finding inspiration there.

2014

This group of texts aims to capture an elusive thought about the materiality of incidence. The word incidence in physics means the intersection of a line, or something moving in a straight line, such as a beam of light. Its origin is from the latin word incidere meaning to ‘fall upon, happen to’. The materiality of incidence is the structure or makeup of a direction of thought. The following texts are just this, thoughts formed from a composition of ideas and elements. Bridges and Tunnels Between Disparate Places is a process of webbing quotes, texts and poetic explorations together into a larger context and searching for an intrinsic likeness within each part. This free form collection of statements, responses and poetic ephemera is a snapshot into a creative process. Observations of elements in flux always change from one moment to the next as do the creative processes of artists in a modernity of evolving technologies and globalized interconnectedness.