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by Donald Maurice Kreis
With all due respect to those who would cast all bridge
balls into the Connecticut River to be swept out to sea, the problem
with the new Ledyard Bridge is that it is too straight, not too
round.
Straight as in the anonymous set of steel girders
that brings Interstate 89 across the Connecticut River by the K-Mart
in West Lebanon, or the forgettable new overpass that takes Route
120 over the interstate near the car dealerships in Lebanon. Those
bridges span non-places. But the crossing between Hanover and Norwich
is a world-class setting for a bridge - lush with evergreenery,
ripe with history, emblematic of the contrasting cultures of two
great states. A world-class crossing like that demands a bridge
of grace and wonder, not a mere overpass - albeit one the bridge
builders had the good sense to consult an architect about, once
the ponderous girders were already an inevitability.
That architect is Christopher Carley of Concord, a
thoughtful man who can legitimately claim to be a builder of bridges
in his own right. Before Ledyard, Carley had never designed a bridge
before, but he had done his share of courthouses, schools and churches.
He knew, and the state highway bureaucrats knew, that Carley had
a successful and enviable track record of building bridges between
people - especially people who have emphatically different opinions
but who share an interest in a building project.
He was the right man for the job, as defined by the
New Hampshire Department of Transportation.
Carley built his bridge. What now spans the river
is the design he successfully urged on the concerned and contentious
bistate committee of citizens that itself was convened to prevent
Vermont's Governor Dean and New Hampshire's former Governor Merrill
from coming to blows in a struggle that reprised the two states'
skirmishes over which state owns the river itself. That, alas, does
not make Carley a John Roebling, the visionary engineer who designed
the epoch-making Brooklyn Bridge in New York, or Othmar Amman, whose
design for the George Washington Bridge was considered so beautiful
that the citizens of New York prevailed upon him to abandon plans
to cover the bridge's steel towers with stone. That kind of bridge
builder still exists today, the most famous example being Spain's
Santiago Calatrava, whose innovative use of cables and curves eliminates
whatever distinction may have remained, in the wake of pioneers
like Roebling and Amman, between engineering and sculpture.
Indeed, as the recently raging controversy in the
pages of the Valley News over what Carley calls his "spheres"
and what everyone else seems to call "bridge balls" suggests,
history will not place the Ledyard Bridge with the work of Roebling,
Amman, Calatrava or even the anonymous New Hampshire DOT engineer
who designed the lovely bowstring arch that spans the Connecticut
at Orford. As Carley is the first to explain forthrightly, that
was then - specifically, in the case of the Orford Bridge, 1937
- and this is now.
Now, Carley reports, "highway bridges in New
Hampshire are built to a standard design. Once in a while they go
to the trouble of adding a little decoration on the abutment."
According to Carley, he came on board when the New Hampshire DOT
figured out that having its engineers simply "adding a little
decoration" would not suffice in this special case. Oh, sure,
the Ledyard Bridge builder briefly flirted with delusions of Calatrava
- "the type of bridge that flies," as Carley puts it.
Something like Calatrava's Alamillo Bridge in Seville which resembles
a giant lyre would have been spectacular in this setting, its tower
leaning majestically away from the hilly Hanover landscape. But,
as Carley soon confessed to himself, and as Calatrava himself would
certainly concede, that would have been fundamentally dishonest
in these circumstances. For the reality is that the New Hampshire
DOT had saddled its bridge architect with an off shelf steel girder
design, thereby reducing Carley to what it had originally acknowledged
would not suffice - a decorator to mere adder of flourishes. Carley
says he could have tried to make the Ledyard Bridge look as if it
soars, but "I didn't think anyone would be fooled."
This puts the ongoing bridge ball badinage in some
perspective. Much as Carley's 12 bridge spheres have provoked commentators
like reporter Dan Mackie, storyteller Willem Lange and architectural
historian Marlene Heck, none of them seems to find fault with the
spheres that are perched atop the gateway to the Ledyard Canoe Club,
near the east end of the new bridge. So it cannot be the very notion
of a sphere itself that is so inherently disturbing. Nor does size
alone account for the discomfort. After all, architectural historians
revere, as a design tour de force, the huge white ball known as
the Perisphere that was a central icon of the 1939 New York World's
Fair. What makes the balls so bothersome is that they are part of
a stage set and not a work of engineering. The spheres stand atop
concrete pilings that are as vestigial as the human appendix; they
hold up, or anchor, absolutely nothing. Neither are these decorative
hunks of concrete on speaking terms with the granite that covers
the adjacent wing walls; these two elements do not relate to each
other in any discernable way.
Credit Carley with specifying granite masonry because
he knew that its strength and texture would remind bridge users
of the great stone river crossings of medieval or even Roman times.
But cutting corners and cutting stone do not mix. Done properly,
stone construction is time consuming and expensive; the quality
of the masonry on the Ledyard Bridge cannot compare with either
its Roman antecedents or with more recent imitations. The great
American architect H.H. Richardson built a whole career out of recreating
Romanesque masonry, but he did so for clients like Harvard University
that could devote more resources per square foot than the New Hampshire
DOT can.
One thing the engineers apparently got right, without
Carley's assistance, relates to the granite tablet that purports
to mark the Vermont-New Hampshire border. As every local schoolkid
knows, or should know, the U.S. Supreme Court fixed the boundary
between the two states in 1936, ruling that Vermont ends and New
Hampshire begins at the river's western edge. Carley thought up
the tablet but the engineers decided where to put it, on a pier
that is decidedly not where the river meets Vermont's terra firma.
"It is actually in the right place," exalts Jeff Allbright,
district construction engineer with the DOT, pointing out that the
construction of the Wilder Dam put some of Vermont under water.
Perhaps New Hampshire is too busy with its present Supreme Court
border dispute, involving Maine, to worry about losing part of its
western front. It suffices to note that a more innovative bridge
design might have taken account of the political and geographic
evolution of the site.
But who has time for borders when confronted with
bridge balls? Carley is actually fond of the drawing that appeared
in the Valley News of a grouchy King Kong scaling one of his spheres,
choosing to be flattered by the implicit comparison such an enduring
architectural icon as the Empire State Building. Asked to describe
the purpose of the spheres, he recalls a story he heard in architectural
school about the janitor at the University of Virginia being asked
the purpose of the famous Thomas Jefferson designed rotunda on the
Charlottesville campus, which prompted the janitor to reply: "We
don't use it for anything but a rotunda." The spheres, according
to Carley, are "a little element of whimsy," touches that
are "there for form's sake, to cap and emphasize the vertical
piers." He hopes that pedestrians will soak up that whimsy
while they enjoy the eight 'overlooks' that punctuate the two sidewalks
on either side of the piers, beckoning walkers to stop and contemplate
the river, and that all who pass between Norwich and Hanover will
appreciate how the spheres help create a heroic two directional
gateway between states that thrive on distinguishing themselves
from one another.
Obviously, what Carley is accessing here is a bridge
building tradition of the noblest sort. The Pont Neuf in Paris,
its low arches connecting the disparate culture of that city's Right
and Left Banks, is perhaps the quintessential example of this kind
of bridge. So, too, do a series of angels, created by no less a
sculptor than the great master Bernini in the 17th Century, stand
in the same relation to the Ponte Sant'Angelo over the Tiber River
in Italy as do Carley's spheres punctuate the Ledyard crossing.
Alas, the Seine, the Tiber, and the Thames create
perfect settings for bridges that are low, built of stone and flat.
The Ledyard Bridge strains to impose these conventions in a setting
that cries out for something more subtle and innovative. This effort
fails because, in reality, the Ledyard Bridge is neither flat nor
straight. Careful contemplation (of the very sort Carley hopes his
pedestrian-friendly details will inspire) reveals that the structure
inclines slightly upward toward the Vermont side and even sports
a gentle curve to its roadway.
The world is full of great bridges that dance with
their geographical settings rather than struggle with them, from
Calatrava's masterworks to the more workaday Tappan Zee Bridge,
in which New York Thruway engineers somehow managed to create an
undulating three mile odyssey across the Hudson River at one of
its widest points. By fighting its own curves, the Ledyard Bridge
becomes unsatisfying in the same way a flat map of the round earth
is. It is actually a credit to Carley's instincts as an architect
that he chose to make spheres so prominent in his design. He knows
that this crossing - the place at which two not matching states
greet each other across majestically rushing waters - demands something
more rich and satisfying than a bunch of straight lines from an
engineers' girder catalog.
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