When I first saw that bridge in Minneapolis under construction, where it was going up just a few blocks upstream from the grand old Tenth Avenue Bridge with its classic contours of open spandrel arches, tried and true to the test of time as the aqueducts of Rome, I couldn't but stand there and wonder why on earth they were putting that new, totally shitty looking bridge in over the river--and right there of all places.
Well! As of that date, when the bridge was nearing completion in 1967, the I-35W expressway that it was being built to serve, had not itself as yet come anywhere near to that site. The freeway still remained to be bulldozed through the whole breadth of a then as yet sedate and really quite pleasingly laid-out downtown Minneapolis cityscape, so richly adorned as it then way by the art nouveau architectures of La Belle Epoche with those stately old boulevards planted with elms and flowers, statuary and benches where two major thoroughfares came together, flowing into the downtown Loop past Mount Curve, around all the magnificent old cathedrals, the Tyrone Guthrie theatre, the Walker Art Center and Loring Park.
No! I hadn't the foggiest idea of what the future held in store via the agendae of those city planners, so far as a huge, rumbling, crushing, crumbling invasion of I-35W to come smashing its way through it all, so I couldn't for the life of me imagine why anything so ugly as that horrid green bridge . . .
It doesn't take long to discover through a few quick searches exactly what went wrong in the design of that horrid looking too big for its britches, nasty green bridge. Or just skip the searches and trust to your eyes as you look at the photos. Now, if you were a terrorist with a mind to take that new bridge down, simply ask yourself what a few small well-placed charges could do as your eye catches sight of those four puny points, all that are holding it aloft! See for yourselves where the cantilevered steel trusses come down to make contact with those shockingly spindly looking piers, for the God's sake.
As a quick visit to
Can there be any replacement for the true arch? I am no civil engineer, nor any kind of architect, but something of pure intuition is telling me there must be some quite possibly as yet unfathomed strength of support that comes by a mystery of Cartesian magic in the geometry of the unbroken contour of a curve. Some kind of grand leverage going on there toward a purpose of uplifting things and holding them up, even over the centuries. Just seems there's something in the fact that the Coliseum is still standing that serves a fair amount of support toward that conclusion.
The false arch of cantilevered steel construction that was thought to be very 'state of the art' for I-35W quite clearly has not proven to be quite the smart, fresh, with-it idea as its schemers had thought, seeing how it could not even so much as begin to stand up to "the bridge considered the crowning achievement of Minneapolis city engineer Kristoffer Olsen Oustad" as built between the years of 1926 to 1929 to stand the test of time.
When I stood there that day on my way home from campus looking out over the river to see the way the builders of that new bridge had seen fit in their hubris to design their construction as to seemingly dwarf (in mere terms of height and breadth) the appearance of the old solution, I was not impressed.
No. I was just not impressed.
I am still not impressed.