Today was inaugurated a truly spectcular bridge in Southern France, the Viaduc de Millau.
More pictures and plenty of very detailed technical data
Sometimes, it is good to also be able to celebrate man’s ingenuity and ability to reach for the sky…
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December 14, 2004
The Unbearable Lightness of Bridges
Comments
Building Bridges is far more fun than destroying them.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Dec 14 2004 21:23 utc | 1
Reaching for the skys?
The ISS is running out of food.
Russia is preparing for Soyuz evacuation.
USA have no manned spaced capabilities, that we know of.
Implosion?
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Dec 14 2004 21:31 utc | 2
b – thanks for reformatting…
I added another picture but did not do that right apparently, sorry…
Posted by: Jérôme | Dec 14 2004 22:01 utc | 3
It’s all over our media, and rightly so. Beautiful. Perhaps a bit costly, but hey – the French did it as a prestige object for the Grande Nation, and nothing is too costly for that. I’ll gladly cough up the 6,50 Euros (or 10, or 15) for using it.
Posted by: teuton | Dec 14 2004 22:16 utc | 4
French did it as a prestige object for the Grande Nation
And if all nations built bridges when they felt the need to show their greatness, wouldn´t we all be better off?
Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Dec 14 2004 23:45 utc | 5
Thanks Jerome! These are truly awesome, coming from one who spends every work day drawing bridges. I usually have to do with nothing more than nuts, bolts, and (ick) rebar. =(
Posted by: beq | Dec 14 2004 23:46 utc | 6
Typical French arrogance, trying to rub Americans’ noses in your rationality, competence, and sense of style. Just remember, anything you can do, we can do better.
Posted by: ralphbon | Dec 15 2004 0:10 utc | 7
Spectacular indeed, but it’s hard to get a sense of scale from the photographs. There’s something very similar on the east slope of the Gran Sasso (near Teramo, Italy), but this may be longer and higher (or maybe not)….
Posted by: alabama | Dec 15 2004 0:18 utc | 8
It’s the world’s “tallest” bridge, according to the WaPo, and at one point you cruise 900′ above the Tarn….So if you’re acrophobic, like me, it’s probably best to sit in the driver’s seat, and stare straight ahead….
Posted by: alabama | Dec 15 2004 3:24 utc | 10
The bridge is a marvel. And so beautiful. What I don’t understand is how it could be cheaper than building a road down on the gorge floor, or was it more about sparing the town than $$$?
Thanks Jérôme!
Posted by: Stoy | Dec 15 2004 3:30 utc | 11
Yep, it was built to reduce severe congestion in Millau. According to BBC World News, it’ll reduce the trip by four hours. Driving down those steep, narrow mountain roads is just begging for death anyway.
As much of a cliche as it is, this bridge really is an “instant classic”. I wonder if it’s on the tourist postcards already.
Posted by: Harrow | Dec 15 2004 4:56 utc | 12
Ah, thanks Jérôme!
I saw that this evening on BBC and thought of you.
It’s breathtaking- absolutely stunning.
No mention of it on america news that I saw either. We can’t stand it when the french do something neato. (wingers everywhere are shouting “curses!! foiled by the cheese-eating surrender monkeys again!”
😉
Posted by: fourlegsgood | Dec 15 2004 5:14 utc | 13
Interestingly, this bridge was built with zero public funds.
The company that built it, Eiffage, also paid for it, and gets in return the exploitation of the bridged for the next 75 years (they also have to guarantee its good condition for the next 120 years….)
They expect 10,000 cars per day all year long and 35,000 cars during the summer, a time when it will come handy for the city of Millau: it was the last missing bit of the freeway between Paris and the Mediterranean sea, and cars would get stuck crossing the city through medieval streets between the two bits of highway; the traffic jam could take you longer than the rest of the trip from Paris on a busy summer Satruday…
It will be the only paying bit in the portion of the highway in the Massif Central mountain area, which makes the overall trip still pretty cheap relatively speaking (French freeways have tolls costing about 1$/10 miles). This is how France tries (amongst other things) to encourage development in more isolated areas, by subsidising the big infrastructure network over there.
Anyway, sorry for the lecture. Go see the other sites for more pictures!
Posted by: Jérôme | Dec 15 2004 7:34 utc | 14
Butttttt……Jérôme, you should see xAm. missiles, tanks & bombs….
Thanks, I was hoping you’d tell us about it today. Lost in Nightmare America, which celebrated yesterday by making the Deuxieme Coup d’état official yesterday, one can forget that others we love are still truly soaring.
Posted by: jj | Dec 15 2004 8:03 utc | 15
Sorry for the bridge, but I know the area, and half of the year the bridge will be closed. Look de clouds and the fog coming fron the Tarn.
Posted by: curious | Dec 15 2004 11:25 utc | 16
@ beq
The engineers that designed this bridge obviously used a lot of rebar as well, there are 85,000 cubic meters of concrete in this stunning structure.
Posted by: dan of steele | Dec 15 2004 13:29 utc | 17
Thanks d of s, I’m feeling better about my puny little bridge already.=)
Posted by: beq | Dec 15 2004 13:46 utc | 18
thanks for the post, Jerome.
I just watched the Canal 2 coverage (where I am, we get news from other countries via scola language tv…www.scola.org)
Posted by: fauxreal | Dec 15 2004 13:57 utc | 19
Thanks, Jérôme! I heard about this and was very curious. It’s beautiful.
Contrast this with the discussion on NPR yesterday about the new San Francisco Bay bridge. Apparently, for budgetary reasons, and per the Gropinator’s direction, they may proceed with a design that resembles a miles-long concrete on-ramp.
“Drama and debate surround the massive Bay Bridge project linking San Francisco and Oakland, which has run into money problems. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to replace the earthquake-damaged bridge with a causeway, derided by critics as a freeway on stilts, instead of the suspension bridge favored by many locals in the Bay Area.”
The planned suspension bridge.
Ve don’t need no swirly girlie-man bridge! Ve will instead pump up a sturdy, manly, long and straight concrete bridge!
Posted by: OkieByAccident | Dec 15 2004 15:53 utc | 20
It is quite beautiful. From my possibly-warped perspective it looks like yet another ultimately doomed Monument to the Automobile God — far lovelier than most, but still a temple for the cult of our modern Moloch…
De, but like most Temples, it will be around to be worshipped long after what gave rise to it has passed – assuming it’s not blown up. And it will be a beautiful place to hold funerals for the endless nameless humans killed by the global warming its presence helped facilitate. But then medieval temples celebrated a culture that destroyed human life in vast numbers as well. Maybe that’s the message – by the time any culture is rich, powerful, self-conscious & sufficiently triumphant to build such exquisite monuments to itself, it’s already looking far into the rear-view mirror.
France, like America, celebrates the triumph of culture over nature, but in keeping w/their tradition of Western Cultural Supremacy, they merely do it Beautifully, unlike the hasty, money-obsessed, merely functional America.
I’m rather disappointed the French chose this increasingly obsolete route, rather than trying to pioneer the integration, the harmony, the accomodation of the two in a beautiful new way.
Noticeable by it’s absence is a RGiap post. Hope he feels better quickly.
Posted by: jj | Dec 15 2004 20:45 utc | 23
@jj by the time any culture is rich, powerful, self-conscious & sufficiently triumphant to build such exquisite monuments to itself, it’s already looking far into the rear-view mirror.
yowza, very nicely put. thank you! wish I’d said that.
when a culture gets into the Pyramid-building stage I suspect it means that the kleptocratic classes have managed to get their hands onto a huge chunk of the productivity of the nation — and this stratification and centralised control imho is a harbinger of inevitable decay. I’m groping around in the dark here, too busy with mundane affairs to spend much time being a Thinking Person; but it seems as though the concentration of wealth and power leads to decay and disorder as inevitably as an aggressive tumour, gobbling up the body’s resources, leads to metabolic crash and disorganisation. so it is at the moment of maximum concentration that we get the Great Works — the glories of Imperial Britain’s museums and libraries, grand opera, high baroque architecture, the symphonic orchestra, the Forbidden City, the Taj Mahal, hell, Shakespeare’s plays. the feverish flush and ethereal beauty of the terminal TB patient? more than one historian has commented on the peculiar tendency of empires and civilisations to flourish creatively, artistically and culturally in one last glorious gasp of showmanship, before going under.
what is sustainable is diverse, fractal, locally viable, slow, and by its very nature not spectacular but rather quotidian, ordinary, subtle, humble (of the earth). the “Great Works,” the wonders (spectacles) of the world, all seem to be in one sense or another the product of slave labour — i.e. the massive concentration of resources both human and natural under the tight control of an elite.
Theorem: when free, happy, and unexploited, when operating in a sustainable way at 2-4 pct return on energy invested, the world and its people do not yield enough fat for the fat-skimmers to build Pyramids. To get that amount of surplus fat, someone or something has to be squeezed hard, perhaps to the death.
But humans have a perverse desire and appetite to “transcend the mortal,” defy the bounds of physics and biology, and build Pyramids — cost no object — as determined as any tagger to scrawl their anthropoid grafitti across the walls of the world, bankrupting their ecosystems and cultures at the moment of “greatest achievement.”
So this would be one explanation for the ring of truth in jj’s (far more pithy and succinct) observation above…
@jerome — but being a jumped-up primate myself, I am just as susceptible to the Oooh Gee Wow of it all as anyone else — it truly is beautiful in a way that “civilised” people are very receptive to and would have a very hard time resisting. My brain knows that in terms of a functioning ecosystem, in terms of survival, earthworms and fungi are far more beautiful — and that for all our cleverness we cannot create a single earthworm from raw materials. But my greedy eyes (hat tip to St Augustine) thrill at the soaring lines of the suspension bridges, their catenary curves, the notion of standing at the railing and looking out at all that space, the imagined sound of the wind in the cables.
This inability to resist the candy of the Glorious, the Monumental, the Spectacular — as a magpie cannot resist bright sparklies and a cat cannot resist a running mouse — I fear may yet be the death of us all.
You know, one of these weeks we’ll have to declare a happy week, where only positive comments can be made for seven whole days.
Nothing but the sound of crickets or cicadas for seven whole days…
Colman, currently looking forward to contributing towards the destruction of the world by flying to Paris for a week in just over a month.
The genius of late industrial capitalism is in the way it persuades us to enjoy and look forward to the exquisite crunchy sweetness of marshmallows toasted over the flames, as our house burns to the ground.
I heard the NPR story too, Okie. One point they made is that Golden Gate was built during the depression. What is also amazing is that the money to build it was raised by the citizens of the six counties that formed the Golden Gate Bridge District which raised a $35m bond in Nov. 1930 and put up their own property as security on the bond. Monumental civic projects with this kind of grass roots backing and financing is, as far as I know, unheard of today. As far as I am concerned the problem with motor vehicles is the motor and not the vehicle. Well, mostly the motor. And the fact that communities are built around cars and not people. And that our highway system lacks a concerted and deliberate commitment to landscaping. I don’t believe that great works have to be at the expense of larger society. It is only because so many other things are at the expense of society that it tends this way. Imagine if schools and alternative energy and poverty abatement all took priority over the military and corporate wellfare. Spending 5 billion on a gorgeous bridge would not be an issue, and in fact would be natural in a society that values humanity and beauty.
Posted by: Stoy | Dec 17 2004 3:07 utc | 28
Thank you Stoy,
I was starting to doubt my infatuation in bridges. But if you look at a bridge from a certain perspective you see an investment in energy to enable a decrease in the energy needed to travel a certain distance. Of course this decrease releases energy that then can be used for good or bad, as everything else.
And bridges are among the most useful Great Works there is. In the end you can travel on them, and that is more then you can say about the Pyramids.
Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Dec 17 2004 3:23 utc | 29
Wow, beq, that was depressing. Especially because it is so true.
…
It will be our soulless and generic little landmark. It will stand for decades to come and we will say, sure it’s ugly. Sure it’s a giant concrete slab. Sure it’s graceless and uninspired and brutish and an architectural embarrassment and sure it is, perhaps more than anything else, one massive and rather humiliating missed opportunity.
Hey, that’s America in a nutshell, sweetheart. That’s the Bush era, right there. You want grace and beauty and dreams all coupled with soaring notions of hope and progress? Move to France, hippie.
Posted by: stoy | Dec 18 2004 3:30 utc | 31