BRIDGES:The Accursed Monumentalists

Caltrans in the Bay area is embroiled in battles over the esthetics of a replacement span for the eastern part of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridge. The stretch of water to be re-spanned – between Yerba Buena Is and Oakland – is mostly quite shallow, and it is most sensibly bridged with a clean-lined concrete or steel box girder design on a bunch of modest columns. But the Oakland mayor, famous 50s-hippie and former governor, Jerry Brown has gotten big into monuments in his old age and stirred up support for his very own Golden Gate type bridge as the entryway to Oakland – which when I last visited looked to have many higher priorities, especially lower local taxes and less oppressive regulation to attract some business to an area devastated and substantially depopulated by rampant crime, welfarism, and lousy schools.

Instead of defending functional bridge design, Caltrans under the Wilson Admin made the mistake of trying to buy off Mayor Brown by coming up with an unnecessary cable-stayed suspension span over a narrow secondary shipping channel. Not good enough, says Brown, who now won’t go along with anything less than a “real” signature bridge. Give em’ a foot of a span and they’ll take a mile.

A sensible architectural principle is that form should follow function. In shallow water where piers are relatively cheap you have a lot of them to save on the size and cost of the bridge beam. But over deep water piers become hugely expensive and it makes sense to put materials and money into a fancy ‘beam.’ That’s when you validly get into great arches and suspension arrangements from grand soaring towers. Where you don’t need to do that, it is disgusting waste and absurd pretense.

We’re not knocking concern for esthetics, just redundant structure. There’s every reason to make the lines and detailing of every structure pleasing, within the guidelines of form following function. It usually doesn’t cost much, indeed it often saves resources, to have smooth lines and to avoid eye-jarring inconsistencies; to find a good pattern and replicate it, many times, or echo a visual theme with subtle changes.

But the monument builders want false or faux-bridges. They want superfluous decoration and grandiose structure. They want to pretend they have built something very daring and difficult, that they struggled against great odds, and have overcome a great natural obstacle. In other words they are phonies, pretenders, conmen. Spendthrifts with other people’s money. They don’t want to admit that their little backyard is really quite plain and ordinary, and rather lacking in engineering challenge. And often, like the magician at a critical point in the act, they need a striking construct out there in the distance to distract attention from the squalor they have created in their other policies and projects.

If Jerry Brown gets his way and the taxpayers of California are landed with a bill of $200m or so to satisfy this guy’s ego, everyone should at least know the fanciful structure over the Bay as the Moonbeam Bridge in memory of the nickname his opponents gave him when he was a big-spending high-tax governor in the 60s. Brown’s lasting accomplishment was generating the political backlash in California that swept Ronald Reagan into the state governor’s mansion, and then to the White House.