Exhibitions
Living Bridges (Royal Academy, till 18 December)
A bridge too far
Alan Powers
Living Bridges has got people talking, but not, perhaps, in the way it was meant to. The exhibition is magnificent, the cata- logue instructive, but the proposal to build one of the invited designs for an 'inhabited bridge' across the Thames between Water- loo and Blackfriars is surely superfluous, as several commentators have observed.
The exhibition shows a sequence of actu- al or projected bridges with architectural superstructure, from Old London Bridge and other mediaeval prototypes, through the Enlightenment fascination with `Bridges of Triumph', well provided with columns, up to 20th-century mixtures of visionary folie-de-grandeur and oppor- tunism. It is well worth visiting for the beautiful models, spanning a series of bar- counter height troughs of muddy-looking water, designed by Nigel Coates. Does this excursion into a virtually defunct building type justify its revival?
On the positive side, those bridges that exist, such as the Ponte Vecchio and the Rialto, are precious and delightful orna- ments of their cities and a pleasant way of getting across their respective rivers. Pul- teney Bridge in Bath looks very pretty from a distance, although when on it the river disappears from view. That these are pre- industrial stone structures, with the consis- tency of material and limitation of span that this implies, is certainly a contributory cause to their charm. The exhibition pre- sumes an uninterrupted flow from the world of architectural tradition into the modern world of heroic engineering which is in reality an abrupt change of level, like shooting a weir. If unavoidable in the course of history, the effect is unsettling.
The other presumption inherent in the consistent breadth of the River Anna Livia Plurabelle running through the galleries is that all rivers are as one and the bridges can be scaled up or down to fit without loss of context. Rivers are very different, and the Thames is perhaps the most difficult to span graciously. Its tidal rise and fall (not a factor in Florence, Paris or Rome) changes the relative look of its bridges constantly and inhibits the use of its edges. It is a dan- gerous river, a force of nature, and the his- toric memory of its bridges is more one of sadness and suffering (Victorian suicides, Eliot's vision of Limbo) than of Wordswor- thian joy. It is also very wide and steep- banked along much of its northern side. No level saunter among the leather shops here, nor the chance of making a toy-like fancy from an inhabited bridge, like Sir Edwin Lutyens's proposal for an art gallery across the Liffey. Yet if we join the effort to get the best from our river, what is wrong with the designs on offer?
An inhabited Thames bridge has to be big. The designers were required by the Port of London Authority to leave a 160 meter clear span for navigation, which reduces the design potential of the struc- ture. The French joint winner of the offi- cial competition, Antoine Grumbach, suspends the span from a tower on the north bank. Future Systems and Branson Coates go for bulging pods. The conditions make a rhythmic composition almost impossible and the only traditional design, by Rob Krier, which has towered gateways at either end with a relatively transparent middle, is unhappy at this grand scale. In the design by Zaha Hadid, the other joint winner, the bridge is reduced to a series of curved filaments between cut-off extrusions of accommodation which would be easy to caricature but is actually the best in its appreciation of the poetics of the Thames and bridges in general. By leaving the mini- mum structure in the middle it would frame views rather than blocking them, and its non-aligned riparian clusters signify a yearning hopelessness that belies the loose talk of bringing North and South London together.
Hadid's design seems already to have changed for the worse between the concept model and the larger-scale detailed model, no doubt becoming more practical in the process. It would be splendid to have a Hadid bridge (or almost any of the others) crossing a gravel pit near Heathrow or a reservoir in the Lea Valley, bringing life to such forgotten beauty spots of London. Why not the Thames? An inhabited Thames bridge has got to try harder to say something meaningful about this difficult river. Sanitised and shielded from the wind and rain, a bridge to a developer's brief endorsed by John Gummer is too full of tourist platitudes, speaking of prime sites, pedestrian flow and sentimental greenery. Les Amants du Pont Zaha might phone each other across the gap between their studio apartments, but could they feel the cosmic force of moon and tide, the history of shipping, hard work and mad pleasure, or respond to the varied lights of the river? Since we cannot return to the picturesque chaos of old London Bridge, why not give way to this urge by taking over our existing bridges for seasonal festivals with tempo- rary structures and meanwhile relearn the art of inhabited bridges somewhere less conspicuous.
`Design for a Triumphal Bridge, 1799 by Joseph Gandy after John Soane
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