Quote:
Originally Posted by Muta
The irony in the design is that it is one of Calatrava's most conservative and low-key bridges he's designed. And yet some people still bitch about how wild it is.
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Visually it may be low-key, but I can assure you that the engineering required to design the thing is certainly not low key.
People can say what they want about how it looks, but the quality of design and engineering is not up for debate.
Let's consider the Deerfoot bridge over the Bow river, south of the 22x. Those girders are about 63 metres long (approximately half as long as the peace bridge). They are also something like 4 metres tall of solid concrete. I think pedestrian bridges are required to support virtually as much load as a road bridge is. Can you imagine the girders that would have been required to span clear across the river? And how in the world would you propose to make such a bridge look good.
Now let's remember that nearly the entirety of the peace bridge was made from flat sheets of steel. There's no extruded pieces (I beams or Box beams, etc) that are preengineered. THe flat sheets of steel had to be cut, bent at an unconstant rate (since the bridge is oval shaped), and twisted at an unconstant rate (again to fit the diagonal pattern and the oval shape), and then welded together to make what appears to be an oval tube with diamond holes punched out. All of that has to be engineered from scratch (most designs you have at least some preengineered peices, whether it be girders, cables, whatever. And all of that weight distribution comes down to one point on either end.
Oh, you won't find the electrical panels, conduits, etc sitting beside the bridge either, as you might normally find on a regular bridge, because the electrical rooms are hidden in the foundations, and the steel has been designed with all of the wiring, etc, in mind as well.