One of the occupational hazards of studying structural engineering, even if one’s studies and work do not generally involve bridges specifically, is the tendency to stare at bridges. One of the joys of living in a city like Portland, or any city blessed with a sufficiently large body of rivers and creeks and enough civic pride to desire those bodies of water to be bridged with works of both art and science, is the large amount of beautiful bridge porn that drivers less inclined to appreciate the beauty of bridges drive over without any appreciate of their beauty. While I occasionally have written about bridges before [1] [2], I would like to take at least some effort to write about the appeal of bridges to me and how it has occasionally shaped my personal behavior in ways that others may not easily understand.

How have bridges shaped my behavior? For one thing, I was born just outside of a city (Pittsburgh) that has the most bridges in the United States. Perhaps my love of bridges was conditioned from my youth. Also, bridges in general tend to be natural chokepoints for transportation and logistics, given that their expense tends to mean that they are not built in a profligate fashion, but are rather reserved for the most important routes at the most important points. I became aware of how bridges shaped my behavior as a young adult when I once drove somewhat out of my way and risked having my poor little car blown about simply so I could drive across the Sunshine Skyway Bridge on a lovely Friday afternoon on the way to visit some friends who were visiting Florida from California a few years ago (a story of considerable interest on its own involving a national “News Of The Weird” headline). More recently, whenever driving from Canby or Oregon City during the day, I have made a special point of driving across the lovely little two-lane bridge across the Willamette River on State Highway 43 as opposed to the larger and more mundane bridges. I just happen to love quirky bridges. Apparently I am not the only person to love them either; last week a lovely guide to the murals of one of the towns of the area showed one mural that showed a prominent bridge over the Clackamas River in it, a sign that the artist and guide, like me, was an fan of what might (affectionately and lightheartedly) be considered bridge porn.

What kind of bridges do I find attractive? After all, there are a great variety of bridges, some of them rather mundane, but some of them extremely artistic. The types of bridges I find attractive tend to fit fairly consistent patterns. I am particularly attracted to the elegant beauty of suspension bridges, but those are not very common and are extremely expensive to build (the two factors are related). A suspension bridge combines art and physics in a particularly elegant way, showing a balance between the compression of the towers and the tension of the parabolic curves of the wires used in suspending a bridge across often wide chasms. In contrast to this, I love truss bridges (whether wood or steel) because of the way in which the structural elements of the bridges are openly exposed for the world to see and appreciate, and there is a certain beauty in that openness to me as well. Also, I greatly enjoy covered bridges for their old-fashioned and innocent reminders of childhood and slightly more carefree times and places, a reminder of my persistent longings for domestic comfort and peace in structural form. Even the humble and often-cursed drawbridge reminds me of castles and my own desire for bridges to serve the task of defenses, as they do over a castle moat filled with alligators in my dream house, the bridge let down to allow for people to enter when I allow. While the reasons I appreciate different types of bridges are themselves varied, together they make for a rather straightforward and revealing understanding of the way in which aspects of engineering form part of my larger body of interests and concerns.

While we might not at first think of engineers as a particularly poetic group of people, enraptured by what could be considered art, this is not necessarily the case, if we investigate closely. Sons Of Martha, my first engineering textbook, included in its pages a very eloquent poem written by the designer of the Golden Gate bridge upon its completion. Even those of us who have studied structural matters have been drawn to write enraptured prose about the beauty of bridges and other structures, inasmuch as we would be compelled to compose poetry by other types of beauty as we may encounter in our lives. For some of us, the beauty and elegance of such structures is not in any diminished by their utilitarian purposes (such as transportation) nor in an appreciation of the laws of physics and material science that govern their construction and structural stability. Knowledge of function, indeed, can serve to heighten our appreciation of the way in which elegant beauty need not be impractical but can be immensely useful and socially beneficial while retaining the wonder and beauty it evokes in its initial and external impressions. Oh, that we could be so fortunate in all aspects of our lives.

[1] http://www.examiner.com/list/some-of-portland-s-most-notable-bridges

[2] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/the-bridges-of-multnomah-county-the-sellwood-bridge/