Manifestos for design

Over at Building Design's website, the excitingly-named "The Engineer's Blog" reports on an attempt to get engineers to write their own manifestos for design.

While manifestos are most often associated with politicians, they are also fairly common in art and architecture, with a tradition dating back at least to the Futurist call to "exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap".

They are much less common in engineering design, presumably because a call to design objects "that work efficiently and don't injure their users" lacks a certain pizzazz.

The manifestos reported at The Engineer's Blog place their emphasis not on the product but on the process, asking for "connecting ideas" and to apply the "wisdom of crowds".

In the interests of applying the latter principle, I thought I would ask you, the reader, for your input.

What would a manifesto for bridge design or engineering look like? Have there actually been any?

Living bridge proposed for Budapest

Plans have recently been announced by Hungary's development minister Tamás Fellegi for a new pedestrian bridge across the Danube near the National Theatre in Budapest. It would form part of a wide-ranging series of new developments, the New Szechenyi Plan, but doubts have been expressed by Budapest's mayor as to where the money to build it would actually come from.


Initial design proposals have been prepared by Hungarian architect József Finta, who from the images below seems to be suffering from a definite case of Zaha-Hadid-envy (particularly for her firm's Zaragoza bridge-pavilion). The proposal is for an enclosed bridge incorporating shops, restaurants and cafes, and links to a convention centre. There have been a number of proposals for inhabited bridges with similar features, to be funded by developers, but it's unclear whether the land values would justify it in Budapest, or whether the impact on river-side views would be acceptable.


Finta suggests that the bridge could be named after János Bolyai, a 19th-century Hungarian mathematician known for his work in non-Euclidean geometry.

Bridges news roundup

Engineer reveals plan to strengthen Forth bridge for £200m
Retired mechanical engineer thinks he could save Scottish government a bob or two.

Officials plan to raise roadbed of Bayonne Bridge without stopping traffic
A professor of civil engineering at Cleveland State University claims the Bayonne arch "doesn't care" about the higher location for the new road deck. Someone tell this man about wind loading, please.

Tees Rope Bridge Idea Resurrected
Waterman Aspen investigate the options for a 200m long suspension bridge at Barnard Castle, Durham.

No bridging fight over Istanbul's Golden Horn
55m tall horn-shaped towers threaten Istanbul's world heritage status

Complex construction delays Peace Bridge
Is it just me or does this look like a complete embarrassment? This isn't the first report of delays on Calatrava's Calgary footbridge caused by fabrication difficulties. Here, the critical need for strong, ground-flush welds is cited as the problem - surely the contractor knew what they were taking on? Have the reporters got it completely wrong?

St. Patrick’s architect says bridge is like a 'fine wine'
Hopefully RFR will design a weld-free bridge so as to be sure it can be built on time.

Jinsha footbridge design competition

I will join a number of other websites who seem to parrot each others' news by reporting the shortlist for a new pedestrian bridge design competition in China. This one is for a 400m long structure at Jinsha Lake in Hangzhou, and the invited designers are:

• Denton Corker Marshall
• Grimshaw
• Marc Mimram with Tianjin Urban Planning & Design Institute
• Petroff Partnership Architects
• Wilkinson Eyre
• Zaha Hadid

That's all I know, so if anyone can point me towards more information, that would be appreciated.

ARC Wildlife Competition winner announced

The winner of this contest to design a prototype wildlife bridge in Colorado has been announced: HNTB with Michael Van Valkenburgh & Associates.

When I previously covered the competition finalists, I noted that this design was my favourite, because the structural form is both easy to erect and readily adaptable to different geometries. The bridge has the elevation of a portal frame, but functions as a three-pinned arch, with the two halves of the portal propped against each other at the crown.


Each precast concrete element is in the form of a hyperbolic paraboloid (hypar) shell, which provides high stiffness while being of low weight, hence easy to erect without requiring unduly heavy craneage. The size can be readily amended and multiple units stacked side-by-side to create differently sized wildlife crossings.


The jury report [PDF] makes interesting reading, stating that the winner:

"combined brilliantly an overarching focus on wildlife habitat, behavior, and viability with a practical intelligence regarding the making of such a work of infrastructure. The scheme marries well a simple elegance with a brute force. It effectively recasts ordinary materials and methods of construction into a potentially transcendent work of design."

Clearly, they were looking for something practical and modest rather than an architectural statement in its own right.

I wonder whether the winning design has wider applications than just for use in building wildlife bridges. For example, could it substitute for the precast con-arch system sometimes used to cheaply span watercourses, but which lacks the ideal profile for spanning roads and railways? The challenge is in getting the formwork adaptable for precasting a wide range of geometries, and I'm not entirely convinced by the simple diagrams provided above (click on any image for a larger version).

"Landscape and Structures: A Personal Inventory of Jürg Conzett"

I'd been looking to get hold of this book since I narrowly missed out on visiting Jürg Conzett's Swiss pavilion at the Venice Biennale last year. "Landscape and Structures: A Personal Inventory of Jürg Conzett" (Scheidegger und Spiess, 272pp, ISBN 978-3858813213, 2010) [amazon.co.uk] presents a travelogue of civil engineering structures throughout Switzerland, drawn from a series of joint trips by Conzett and the photographer, Martin Linsi.

I managed to get a copy from buch.ch, and it's a delightful tome. Divided into chapters both geographically and chronologically (so the early chapters begin with a winter trip, and the final ones in early summer), a wide variety of structures are selected by Conzett for their ability to exemplify successful aesthetic outcomes from an engineering process. They are pretty much all highway, railway or footway structures, from all periods of history, and several examples are of the highways themselves rather than the walls and bridges that support them.

All the structures are photographed in black and white, and accompanied by text both in English and German where Conzett explains various points of interest. A bibliography gives details of further information where it is available. The photos are generally very good, and in several cases quite beautiful, often due to the landscape as much as the structure.

The bridges include everything from historic masonry arch and covered timber spans through to the most recent designs, including several of Conzett Bronzini and Gartmann's own structures. Of the better known structures, Robert Maillart's Salginatobel Bridge is conspicuous by its absence, but it is perhaps over-exposed anyway. The joy here is in the fresh perspective and the exposure of unseen delights.

Much of Conzett's emphasis is on vision and visibility, how a bridge offers a fresh perspective along its length, or how the curve of a road is not merely an exercise in checking sightlines but the opportunity to improve the driver's perspective upon the surrounding landscape. Looking at a seemingly minor retaining wall in the Graubünden, Conzett's attention is drawn to a low-level ledge which both improves driver visibility as well as reducing the apparent height of the wall.

Similarly, the sagging deck curve on Conzett's own Traversinersteg (pictured) is both a means of stiffening the bridge (it allows the deck to react against the prestressing of the support cables) and also a way of reducing the perceived steepness of the bridge's precipitous stairway. This concern for a design that synthesises structural, perceptual, and aesthetic demands, runs through the whole book.

Another welcome aspect is the attention given to designers who have, certainly in English-speaking countries, perhaps been overshadowed by others. Three lovely bridges by Alexandre Sarrasin are included, as is the spectacular Dala Gorge Bridge by Zumofen und Glenz.

My favourite bridge in the whole book is one of the newest, Conzett's Dorfbrücke in Vals, designed with Peter Zumthor. This is a work of purest genius which on first sight appears to be a concrete decked bridge supporting unusual masonry parapets, but in reality is a masonry arch from which a concrete slab is hung, the slab also acting as the arch tie. The engineering is ingenious, but it's the bridge's juxtaposition of brute minimalism and tactile appeal that is most admirable.

This is a very unusual book. It seems at first to be too unstructured a travelogue to hold its appeal, but the combination of excellent photography with Conzett's consistently impeccable judgements makes for a very enjoyable read.

Further information:
Jürg Conzett: engineering matters - an interview about the book

Did Brunel design the Clifton Suspension Bridge?

Can this be true? A new book by Adrian Vaughan on the famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel is reported to claim that he didn't even design one of his best known structures, the Clifton Suspension Bridge (pictured right, courtesy of Damien Everett on Flickr).

Vaughan's earlier book, "Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Engineering Knight-errant", was a revisionist critique of the widespread view of Brunel as not merely a giant amongst engineers, but very nearly the greatest Briton ever. It drew extensively on archive research to depict a designer who was confrontational, dictatorial, and prone to making over-quick decisions which frequently led to his projects going well over budget. It sought quite consciously to provide a counter-balance to the widely read LTC Rolt biography of Brunel, which by all accounts bought quite deeply into the mythology of a Victorian hero.

The new book that has provoked the headline is Vaughan's follow-up, "The Intemperate Engineer: Isambard Kingdom Brunel in His Own Words". I haven't seen it, but understand it includes many of Brunel's letters and seeks to depict both his genius and his fallibility.

It's certainly not news that the Clifton Suspension Bridge wasn't entirely Brunel's design. His initial 1831 proposal didn't start on site until 1836, and money ran out in 1843. Work on the bridge only restarted in 1862, three years after Brunel's death, with the design revised by William Henry Barlow and Sir John Hawkshaw. In part, changes were made to the bridge width and suspension chain arrangement to make use of chains that became available from the recently dismantled Hungerford Suspension Bridge. Changes were also made to the tower design. But the span and general conception remained as Brunel had proposed.

This situation is hardly unusual even today. Is Stonecutters Bridge the design of Halcrow and Flint and Neill, who (like Brunel) won the design competition and developed the basic concept, or of Arup, who completed the detailed design and made various changes to the scheme? And even if one engineer at any of these firms were put forward as the key engineer responsible, how much did they personally contribute?

The modern era, with design tasks shared across a diverse team, is not that different from the Victorian period. Identifying, and lionising, the big names may help personalise history, but essentially it's the engineering version of the lamentable tendency to see national history as the history of royalty. Suggesting that Brunel designed the bridge at Clifton pays proper tribute to the central figure in its creation, while obscuring a more complex reality.

It's also worth considering to what extent Brunel's present-day reputation is based on his forceful personality as much as on his actual engineering achievements. Was he a better engineer than Thomas Telford, Robert Stephenson, or lesser known contemporaries like Thomas Kennard? There seems to me to be an almost willful desire in the popular media to treat Brunel as heroic in the manner of a great general, to gloss over his many flaws and the fact that many of his enterprises were disasters. Like Stephenson, his greatest bridge designs were spectacular and perhaps revolutionary, but rarely of such importance that they became templates for wider adoption.

It's interesting, perhaps, that most popular histories relating to civil engineering are of the royalist type: biographies of the famous names. I can't think, off hand, of any popular books that get to grips with the wider social aspects of the 19th century revolution in scientific bridge design, although there are certainly specialist histories that address it.

Of course, a headline that simply stated "new biography confirms what we already knew in old biographies" is neither going to sell newspapers nor justify a journalist's time and expenses. The need to manufacture controversy is understandable. What I'm less clear on is the underlying need to propagate a heroic mythology, and to defend it against any inquisition, however plausible.