Comparison to Canada's Confederation Bridge
Wow. Incredible bridge! Talk about over-achievement!
I can only compare it to Germany's Kochertal Viaduct (near Gieslingen) or Canada's Confederation Bridge, both of which are spectacular.
Now, wouldn't it be cool to build the Rye-Oyster Bay Bridge (finally!)
Sorry I took forever to respond back.Originally Posted by MidnightRambler
I like it, but I wish it was a rail bridge. Imagine going over that in a TGV... :shock:
what?ops: But the reason why I said that is because Lord Norman Foster Team is known to design bad bridges. One of them is called the Millennium Bridge, located in London and open up in June of 2000. I'm not sure if they edit the team’s design or demolished it. It had flaws to the design.
Last edited by Kris; May 23rd, 2009 at 02:19 PM.
Come fly with me
Inspired by the Eiffel Tower, Norman Foster has created one of the world's most breathtaking bridges.
Jonathan Glancey
Tuesday November 16, 2004
The Guardian
For decades Millau has been clogged in summer by a weight of traffic that beggars belief. From January, though, this old French glove-making town will be liberated. The traffic that races down the A75, connecting Paris through the Massif Central to the Cote d'Azur and on to Spain, will be diverted over the Tarn Gorge some way east of the town, across one of the world's most breathtaking bridges.
A sublime marriage of British and French architecture and engineering, the Grand Viaduc du Millau outdoes even the stirring 10-year-old Pont du Normandie that spans the mouth of the Seine between Honfleur and Le Havre. With a 2.5km span, the Millau bridge is far from the longest in the world, yet it is surely one of the most beautiful. In terms of artistry, it challenges the Garabit viaduct, which Gustave Eiffel built across the River Truyère in 1884.
Where Eiffel's red-painted railway bridge, poised over the void like a leaping ballet dancer, is a triumph of wrought-iron engineering, the cable-stayed Millau bridge is a high-vaulting celebration of the structural dynamics of concrete and steel. At least 10 years in the making, the Grand Viaduc is the result of a collaboration between Foster and Partners with the French engineer Michel Virlogeux, designer of the Pont de Normandie, and the construction consortium Eiffage, with its roots in the works of Eiffel himself.
From the outset, the bridge was intended as an epic work of art. (Initial discussions considered a tunnel as well as four alternative types of bridge under and across the Tarn Gorge.) The day I came this way, walking through rocky paths high above the gorge, the tips of the new bridge's concrete piers were only just visible above the clouds. Given that the tallest of the seven trapezoidal piers, each a major engineering work in its own right, is at least 40m higher than the Eiffel Tower, my early-morning walk demonstrated just how powerful a force nature is here. The bridge ventures across a wild, craggy and weather-beaten landscape, blasted by winds of up to 90mph and scorched by summer sun. So much so that the bridge's steel roadways will expand and contract by nearly 3m between the height of summer and depth of winter.
When the clouds cleared towards noon, the bridge revealed itself as the great work of art it was meant to be. From some angles, the structure is quite ethereal, almost vanishing in the bright light of this high and immense country. Its design is subtle. The course of the roadway curves gently and drops slightly from one end to the other, making the experience of crossing it - I went on foot - an ever-changing delight. The 3m-high screens that protect vehicles from side-winds are transparent and, despite the escape lanes that separate the carriageways from the edges of the bridge, the views will be eye-popping if you travel across by lorry or coach.
The view of the bridge itself, as cars descend towards it, should stir the sensibilities of the most jaded motorway users. Norman Foster says the experience should be like flying by car. He happens to be a pilot; drivers of a more grounded persuasion may find the experience daunting, at least at first, but as the crossing will take on average just over a minute, the bridge will appear and disappear like a trick of the light.
Aesthetics aside, the project's statistics tell a story of engineering derring-do. The viaduct is cradled by 154 steel stays stretched out from seven cloud-piercing concrete piers. The tallest of these rises 326m from the River Tarn. The top of one of the piers is big enough to hold a tennis court. The bridge weighs 242,000 tonnes, comprising 36,000 tonnes of steel and 206,000 tonnes of concrete. There were rarely fewer than 400 workers on site.
It may seem crazy to spend so much energy, and €310m (£220m), on a bridge that relieves one small town of traffic and takes little more than a minute to cross - but a truly magnificent bridge has the power to thrill 99% of us, and to stretch the possibilities of structural engineering and, in turn, the design of the most ambitious future buildings. Did the Forth railway bridge need to be quite so dramatic? Do we really need a sensationally long bridge linking Denmark and Sweden? Is Brunel's Saltash Bridge across the Tamar overwrought for the job it has to do?
Of course, it is possible to design far more mundane bridges than these, such as the ineffably dull Queen Elizabeth II Bridge bearing the M25 across the Thames at Dartford. But, just as our medieval cathedrals or greatest skyscrapers have an ambition far beyond utility, so do the finest bridges. There are many ways of carrying a road, a railway or even a canal across a void; the fact is, we delight in finding fresh solutions and ones that thrill us. The bridge at Dartford could have been designed by the enterprising architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava, but a post-industrial England that finds engineering little more than an embarrassing necessity rejected the Spaniard's impressive design in favour of a bridge that, although mighty, does little more than yawn its way across the Thames. The French did not make this mistake with the Pont de Normandie in 1995, and they've certainly avoided it with the Grand Viaduc du Millau, constructed over the past three and a half years.
Here is a particularly fine example of the arts of architecture and engineering working seamlessly together, and of how a hugely strong structure can appear to be lightweight. This motorway bridge, whatever you think of motorways, has been welcomed by local people. Millau can now happily turn its back on levels of traffic brought by the motorway generation, while, for a minute at a time, motorists will be transfigured by one of the great works of art of our time.
Tallest Bridge??
That's a tricky title to assign.
If you're talking about height over water, the Royal Gorge Suspension Bridge in Colorado still holds the title. It stands 1,053 feet above the Arkansas River.
On the other hand, the Royal Gorge Bridge support piers are not 900 feet tall. So if you measure "highest bridge" by height of pier, the Millau Bridge takes the #1 spot.
December 14, 2004
World's Tallest Bridge Soars Above French Valley
The world's tallest bridge was inaugurated Tuesday. The structure is 885 feet above the Tarn River valley in southern France.
MILLAU, France, Dec. 1, -- A bridge officially designated the tallest in the world was inaugurated by President Jacques Chirac in southern France Tuesday -- a spectacular feat of engineering that will carry motorists at 885 feet above the valley of the river Tarn.
Before an audience of around 1,000 people including architect Norman Foster, Chirac unveiled a plaque by the largest of the bridge's seven pillars which rises to 343 metres above ground level. French air-force jets swept by overhead.
The Millau motorway viaduct stretches for 1.6 miles between two plateaux in the Massif Central mountain range and when it opens to traffic Thursday it will remove one of the country's most notorious bottlenecks.
Unusually for such a large infrastructure project in France, the bridge's 520 million dollars cost was financed entirely by the private sector, with the construction giant Eiffage getting the right to collect tolls for 75 years in return.
Like a taut thread pierced by a line of needles, the silhouette dominates the countryside for miles around and has been praised as a classic marriage of aesthetics and science. More than 60,000 people have already paid for tours of the construction site.
"A work of man must fuse with nature. The pillars had to look almost organic, like they had grown from the earth," Foster said in a special edition of the local newspaper Midi Libre.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
"financed entirely by a private company..."
"the right to collect tolls for 75 years"
Wow...sounds like this might a good way to finance the replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge, eh?
December 17, 2004
MILLAU JOURNAL
Above the Clouds, the French Glimpse the Old Grandeur
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The bridge at Millau, designed to blend with the sky and rising 1,125 feet from the valley floor through clouds to the tallest pillar, officially opened Thursday. The French president pronounced the project "audacious."
MILLAU, France, Dec. 16 - Higher than the Eiffel Tower, longer than the Champs-Élysées, the Millau bridge is a triumph of engineering, imagination and will.
For President Jacques Chirac, the soaring butterfly of steel and concrete that spans the Tarn Valley is nothing less than an "audacious" work of art and a symbol of "a modern and conquering France."
No matter that the man who designed the bridge, the world's highest, is Norman Foster, a 69-year-old British lord and perhaps Britain's most famous modernist architect.
The engineers were French. And in a country yearning to recapture some of its historic grandeur, its official opening on Thursday brought a spirit of giddy celebration to this remote region of southern France.
Construction workers on the project whistled and waved their hard hats in a sign of welcome to maiden voyagers. Drivers waved back, honking their horns long and loud. Tourists and truck drivers got out of their vehicles to take pictures, oblivious to the security guards who ordered them to move along.
"This is a work of art that touches all of us," said Thomas Ercker, a foreman who worked on the project for more than two years. "There is only one time in your life you can do something like this. I am convinced that we've created a jewel. I have goose bumps all over."
Patrice Ficheux, the head of a road security company from Lyon, drove four hours with his wife in their 1959 vintage Jaguar to be among the first to cross.
"I wanted to give my car an adventure in the mountains," he said after making the brief crossing. "I had this wonderful feeing of security, as if someone were holding an arm around my shoulder."
Slender, graceful, even fragile-looking, the gently-curving bridge was built in only three years, the product of computer design technology, global satellite positioning and lighter, high-tech materials that shortened the timetable and cut costs.
The deck for the four-lane road is made from a new high grade of steel instead of concrete. Transparent aerodynamic windscreens protect vehicles from high winds and let travelers savor the rugged landscape.
The pale color of the construction allows it to blend with the sky, giving it a transparent feel. At its highest point - 1,125 feet from the bottom of the valley to the top of the pylon atop the tallest pillar - the bridge is more than 50 feet higher than the Eiffel Tower.
"It had to be very light, very delicate, but immensely strong," said Lord Foster by telephone from London. "The driving experience is close to flying. The trip across the valley is like that of a bird."
Millau (pop. 22,000) is best known as a traffic nightmare on an uncompleted highway route from northern to southern France. The 15-mile stretch up and down the valley can take three hours in the summer, breaking the spirit of even the toughest road warrior.
The completion of the bridge will cut the trip to under 20 minutes. If political and financial hurdles can be surmounted, the bridge eventually will serve as a link in a superhighway from Paris to Barcelona.
For Jacques Godfrain, the mayor of Millau, the bridge could rid his town of the negative image it has suffered for years.
It is here in 2002 that José Bové, the sheep farmer and union leader who is France's leading opponent of globalization, organized the bulldozing of a McDonald's restaurant to protest the Americanization of France. The McDonald's was rebuilt and is now one of the top 10 most popular of the more than 1,000 McDonald's outlets in the country.
"For years we were nobody in the capital of nowhere," said Mr. Godfrain, who wore a tie with silhouettes of bridge designs and has written a novel about bridges. "Now we're the bridge capital of the world."
Mr. Godfrain has designed a New Year's greeting card with an outline of the bridge and the message, "God gives us hands, but he doesn't build bridges."
In the past 18 months, an estimated 500,000 tourists have come to watch the bridge under construction. Residents in Millau hope its opening will encourage tourists to visit the town and inject fresh money into struggling businesses.
Until the 1960's, for example, Millau was known as the French capital for the manufacture of luxury kid gloves, but now few glove makers remain.
"For me, the bridge is double or nothing," said Mary Beyer, who runs the Lavabre Cadet atelier, which produces hand-made luxury gloves for French couture houses and for selected markets abroad.
Here, a pair of rhinestone-studded suede gloves sells for $360, a pair of nutria-trimmed black kid gloves for about $600. The gloves would sell for two to four times as much in New York or Tokyo, she said.
"Millau must get the travelers to stop and see what we can offer," Ms. Beyer said. "If they take the bridge only to pass through quickly, it will be an economic catastrophe."
On a national scale, at least, the French have already started to use the bridge as a selling tool for France.
The Tour de France announced recently that its annual bicycle race will be routed under the bridge next year.
A global ad campaign by the French government last fall intended to lure foreign investment to France includes a promotional CD that uses the Millau bridge as a symbol of modernity. It concludes with the line, "The new France, where the smart money goes."
Indeed, the bridge is a rare example of private money financing the sort of monumental building project so dear to the French.
The French construction company Eiffage, the descendant of the company started by Gustave Eiffel of Eiffel Tower fame, raised the estimated $400 million for the project exclusively from private funds, which will be repaid by tolls over 75 years.
Not everyone is sanguine about it.
Eiffage was also one of the primary builders of the 2E terminal at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, whose partial collapse last spring left four people dead.
While no one is predicting an engineering disaster, traffic safety officials are concerned that the dense fog that shrouds the bridge many afternoons, combined with the temptation to look at the bridge and the landscape instead of the road, will result in accidents.
On Thursday, about 30 demonstrators protested the stiff tolls, about $7 per car - higher in July and August - and $31 per truck.
The demonstrators blocked access to the bridge, then forced the guard rails open to allow cars to pass through for free.
"Merry Christmas!" they shouted as they waved the cars and trucks through and held up a banner demanding more public services, saying, "Free! Free! Free!"
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Wow
Bridge in the clouds
Thursday 5 January 2005
Something as wonderful as this could probably never be built in Britain.
Likened to a ship sailing through the sky, or to a swan frozen in flight, it is soaringly beautiful, hugely expensive and designed and engineered to perfection.
Conceived as much as a work of art as a piece of transport infrastructure, the Grand Viaduc du Millau soars over the Tarn Gorge, in Southwest France.
There are longer bridges, and more expensive bridges, but surely none more gorgeous. And none higher either. Indeed, at 1,127ft, the tallest of the seven slender pillars supporting the two-mile roadway is nearly 150ft higher than the Eiffel Tower.
The Tarn bridge, which was inaugurated yesterday by President Jacques Chirac, completes the newly built 210-mile autoroute connecting the Massif Central to the Mediterranean and Spain.
If such a grand design had been suggested in Britain, it would have been subject to a thousand planning inquiries, been hit by endless delays, become a messy compromise between form and function, and would wobble when it was finally opened.
In France, things are different.
When a new road or railway is needed, it tends to get built, quickly and without fuss, and without too much regard to cost.
That is why the country is blessed with glass- smooth motorways that slice through the landscape like hot knives through foie gras, and with Roman-straight railways along which their amazing TGVs hurtle at around a quarter of the speed of sound.
So no surprises that what is arguably the first truly great piece of engineering architecture of the 21st century should be French.
What is perhaps more surprising is that the co-architect of Europe's biggest engineering project since the Channel Tunnel was completed ten years ago is actually British - none other than Sir Norman Foster.
This will be the longest bridge in France, longer even than the exquisite Honfleur bridge across the Seine at Le Havre.
Its designers reckon that even ten years ago, a bridge like this could not have been built. Its seven graceful towers were designed by computer rather than with pen and slide rule.
This has meant that the stresses could be calculated to incredible accuracy, allowing the very slenderest design and minimum use of materials.
Even so, this is a big structure.
Each of the support piers has a top bigger than a tennis court. The whole thing weighs some quarter of a million tons, and there are 155 almost invisibly-fine steel stays from which the ribbon of Tarmac and steel is suspended.
More than 15,000 vehicles a day are expected to thunder across, relieving the 20-mile traffic jams which used to wind their way down the switchback road up and down to the village of Millau.
Constructing the bridge has proved to be almost as much of a work of art as the design. The seven towers were built simultaneously. Incredibly, only 350 skilled workmen and women were needed to turn the computer-drawn plans into concrete-and-steel reality.
Thanks to the GPS satellite system, each part of the bridge could be placed with needlepoint precision.
In the old days, armies of surveyors would have been needed to make sure that the two ends met in the middle. And it would have taken years. Most of the world's greatest bridges have taken the best part of a decade or more to build. Yet the Millau viaduct has gone from a gleam in Norman Foster's eye to completed reality in just three-and-a-half years.
This makes it sound easy, but in reality constructing this bridge has, at times, been a nightmare.
Winds of 70mph or more regularly came whistling down the Tarn valley, threatening to blow away workmen and concrete alike.
Indeed, the structure has been designed to take the often extreme weather into account - the bridge can rise and fall by more than 10ft as summer heat gives way to winter frost, causing the superstructure to expand and contract.
To most people, the £220million bridge is a work of art. But not to everyone.
Although it will relieve one of France's worst traffic bottlenecks, some environmentalists and farmers have objected that the cars and lorries will frighten birds and, worse, scare the cows who produce the milk that is turned into the famed Rocquefort cheese.
But, being France, the protests have been pushed to one side and the truth is that most people welcome the bridge.
We British used to pride ourselves-on our engineering prowess.
Our bridges, viaducts and tunnels were once the wonders of the modern world. The Forth railway bridge near Edinburgh, a masterpiece of gargantuan engineering, is so solidly built it will last for centuries.
Bristol's Clifton Suspension Bridge is a work of sublime beauty, and the Tamar bridge, linking Devon and Cornwall, a monument to Victorian mathematics and engineering skill.
We seem to have forgotten how to do this. Our architects and engineers can still produce world-beating designs, but we seem to have lost the appetite to think on the grand scale which causes the French breast to swell with pride.
Once we had the likes of Isambard Kingdom Brunel to put Britain on the engineering map. We seem to have lost his spirit, with our endless planning inquiries and cost-cutting. But then, Brunel was the son of a Frenchman.
Building bridges to the people
Thursday 5 January 2005
Sir Norman Foster: The striking designs of Britain's best-known architect are admired and denounced in equal measure, but are always popular with the public.
Gleaming like a silver seashell on the south bank of the Tyne, the £70m Sage concert hall in Gateshead was opened to the public yesterday, offering not the sound of the sea but the sweet song of post-industrial regeneration. Just a few days before, the Grand Viaduc du Millau, suspended 270 metres above the Tarn gorge in France's Massif Central and balanced on seven pillars, the tallest one 16 metres higher than the Eiffel Tower, was opened by the French president, Jacques Chirac, and hailed as a new wonder of French engineering.
The double inauguration gives Britain's best-known architect and the designer behind both, Lord Foster of Thames Bank, considerable cause for seasonal celebration. The shaven head and strong jaw combine to give Norman Foster a combative appearance and even as he heads towards his 70th birthday next year, it is clear he does not plan to step quietly into retirement.
The architect, whose designs also include the world's largest airport and Europe's tallest skyscraper, shows no sign of giving way to a new generation.
Such multi-million pound projects are always a result of team work and Foster and Partners employs 590 people and generates a turnover of £35m, working for an international clientele from offices in London, Berlin and Singapore.
It is, of course, impossible to mastermind such a multiplicity of projects himself, and he gives his senior directors their dues. In the case of the Sage, it is Spencer de Grey, although the Foster signature is always clear on those prestigious projects which will leave a physical imprint of his philosophy on the world.
From the beginning, his work has been innovative and challenging to those who would equate good with traditional. Born in Manchester in 1935, the son of an aircraft factory worker and a waitress, he left school at 16, got a job in the treasury department of the council and did his national service in the RAF, where he trained in electronics and aviation.
It was when he went to work in the contracts department of a Manchester architectural firm, John Bearshaw and Partners, that he became interested in architecture.
At the age of 21 he started studying architecture at Manchester. Unusually for the time, he financed his course by working as a bouncer and ice-cream salesman. He won a postgraduate scholarship to Yale. When he arrived in America, he said later, "I felt I had come home."
He made friends with another British student, Richard Rogers, and together they explored the country in search of buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, whose maxim "Form and function are one" has been an enduring principle.
Back home, they set up in partnership togetherwith theirwives as Team Four. Later, Foster left to set up Foster and Partners. He first burst into British consciousness in the 1970s, with glass-fronted headquarters shaped like a grand piano for the insurance company, Willis Faber and Dumas, in 1970s Ipswich. It established him as a talent for the future.
Foster has always anticipated pioneering solutions which use renewable sources of energy as well as offering dramatic reductions in carbon emission.
THE HALLMARK OF HIS DESIGNS has been efficient functioning. That is as true for the dome which reclaimed the Reichstag as the parliamentary debating chamber for a newly-reunified Germany as for the 47-storey international headquarters for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation suspended on masts above a postage stamp of urban space.
At the time, the HSBC tower was the most expensive building ever, but it achieved iconic status: the bank used it on its notes and Foster achieved international fame.
Foster insists the same philosophy informs much smaller buildings and even furniture and door handles. He has demonstrated an ability to overcome the challenge of a tight budget as well as make an expensive statement, nowhere more than in Glasgow, where the Armadillo's industrial steel shell proved inexpensive, elegant and endearing.
Suspicion of architects remains so entrenched in Britain that it is certain that even if the acoustics of Sage Gateshead prove to be of the quality of the Vienna Musikverein, which was Foster's template, someone at the opening concert is bound to mention the Millennium Bridge and its infamous wobble. While the wobble has long been eliminated from the bridge, it remains a potent reminder of the conundrum modern architecture has become in this country and Foster himself personifies that: his buildings are equally admired and denounced.
It was largely because they had underestimated the popularity of the bridge that it began to sway, and that was compounded by people matching their footsteps to the movement.
Since the problem was solved, it has become a huge tourist attraction.
Another London landmark, the Swiss Re tower, or "gherkin, " became famous not just for its controversial piercing of the London skyline, but because it provoked the departure of one of Foster's longest-serving architects, Ken Shuttleworth, who claimed he had not been sufficiently credited for his work. However, the gherkin also marked a move towards a much rounder style of building for Foster, who has since developed curves and domes including the dome within the perimeter of the Reichstag in Berlin and the helmet-shaped headquarters for the GreaterLondon authority.
Inside its distinctive, helmetlike shape is another public attraction.
The main feature of the interior, an 800-yard spiral staircase, curving through all 10 storeys to the top of the building, is open to the public. As in the Reichstag, the top-floor gallery is a public space, primarily for viewing the city skyline. Like its German cousin, the gallery also enables visitors to look down on debates in the assembly room. Another spiral beneath the debating chamber sweeps down into the ground, providing space for a restaurant.
Despite considerable hostility to the hi-tech nature of these landmark buildings, they have proved enormously popularwith the public. Foster also has a large collection of professional accolades. He was knighted in 1990 and, in 1999, he was awarded the prestigious Pritzker prize. The chairman of the jury, J Carter Brown, noted then that, as a creator of buildings both brilliantly functional and beautiful, "Sir Norman Foster transcends categorisation".
That is even more true now, as his catalogue of commissions has grown to include libraries, schools, offices and transport systems, proving that the first requirement of good design is to fulfil the functional needs of the users of the building. In achieving that, he demonstrated in the most persuasive way possible that the workplace could (and should) be a pleasant environment.
He took that a stage furtherwith his own offices at Riverside Three in London, a glass-fronted building embodying the ecological principles which have increasingly become central to all his designs. It has also provided the most telling rebuke to the complaints that"modern" architects would design buildings differently if they had to live in them.
Above the double-storey open-plan offices, where no-one, Foster included, has a private, enclosed space, are two floors of flats and the penthouse, where the architect himself lives with his third wife and their young children.
In the public realm, we have come to expect more of our new buildings than their stated purpose. So while the Millau bridge was hailed by President Chirac as a new emblem of French civil engineering, Mick Henry, the leader of Gateshead Council, also expects the Sage to trigger further regeneration of the town. For a pioneer like Foster, that is a more than fitting tribute.
www.graduateengineer.com
it is amaizing but still, no bridge in the world can compare to the Golden Gate Bridge. I would like to visit it some day though.
oh my god, my palms are sweating just looking at the photos. I don't even like driving over the Delaware Memorial Bridge. YIKES!
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