Gabion: Equilibrium: 30 Bridges, by Matthew Wells with an introduction by Hugh Pearman. 1/9

This was a very satisfying project. Matthew Wells, from the structural engineering consultancy Techniker, is an engineer and architect with a well-developed aesthetic sense. He simply chooses 30 recent bridges he admires and explains why, always with photographs and the aid of a hand-drawn sketch explaining a particular characteristic of the bridge in question. This is not all: in the same volume you also get Matthew’s authoritative Bridge Design: A Brief History, which is the best crib for students (and the rest of us) I can possibly imagine.

My role in this is to provide an introduction which discusses among other things the nature of bridgeness - the bridge as an object with more than a merely utilitarian value, the bridge as political statement, the bridge as regeneration device, the bridge as a place where architects and engineers can meet on a more or less equal footing. Here is an extract.

Towards the end of the 20th century, deep into the era of post-war value engineering, bridges were rediscovered as vessels of metaphor. A bridge, it was realised, was more than a matter of cold calculation, a way of spanning a given gap to carry a given variable load in certain predictable conditions, using the most economic means. A bridge could be - had previously been - more. Of course the symbolic and political function of linkage had never been overlooked: for instance the great suspension bridges of the 1960s and 1970s had been audacious and beautiful enough to provoke wonder. But at the turn of the 21st century, bridges have come to be perceived in other ways. As a result, what had been largely the kingdom of the traditional civil engineer has also now become a playground for architects and a new breed of design engineers.

Much of the appeal of the bridge type as a design challenge derives from its chameleon nature. Is a bridge a building, or a room, or a road or pathway, or an observation deck, or a gateway, or a roof, or a monument? To what extent is it functionalist rather than expressive? If expressive, to what extent is that communicated through its load-carrying structure, and to what extent through applied forms? It is very likely that nobody ever sits down with such a checklist when they want a bridge. But they have certain desires, and those desires are communicated, for creative interpretation, to their designers.