In brief, are you attracted by any phase of modern bridge-building that copies the decorations of civic architecture, displaying columns, pilasters, niches, balustrades, battlements, towers, turrets, pinnacles, or any other finery that serves no organic purpose in the life of a contemporary bridge? Myself, I hate such a strumpet of a bridge as the Hoogesluis at Amsterdam, with her ornate spandrils, and her embossed masonry, and her balustraded parapet surmounted by a row of obelisks around which lamps are bracketed. Also I hate such a suspension bridge as the one at Conway Castle, where the metal rods that support the roadway pass through a brace of turrets on each of the embattled gateways. The effect is not only comic but ludicrous. No engineer with any sense would have put a metal viaduct within a few yards of Conway Castle. Or, if a metal suspension had been forced upon him by his employers, he would have made in a modern style a very simple and stern design. Instead, we have two vulgar gateways rudely copied from Conway Castle, and then lacerated by five metal rods that cut through each of the four turrets. I am reminded of an absurd railway bridge at Cologne, whose parapets are—or were—flanked by small turrets, and whose gateway has—or had—two high towers formidably armed with make-believe battlements and machicolations. Such futile pretension is a public insult; it implies that laymen have no common sense at all in their attitude to “feats of engineering.”
But it is not the modern bridge alone that provokes criticism in this matter of decorative art. Some ancient and famous bridges are hard nuts to crack as soon as we pass from their structural fitness to their ornamentation. As an example I may choose the Ponte Sant’ Angelo at Rome, which has been copied feebly by the Schloss Brücke at Berlin. Originally the Sant’ Angelo was the Pons Ælius, built by Hadrian (A.D. 13) face to face with his mausoleum, to-day the castle of Saint Angelo. In the seventeenth century new parapets were added to the bridge, and ten colossal statues by Bernini were put up on pedestals along the parapets. Around these statues many a controversy has raged, and I am not surprised. In my photographs there is a small lamp-standard between each pair of huge figures; even the lights of Rome have to twinkle below the decorations. The bridge looks burdened rather than adorned; it is neither wide enough nor high enough to be used as a gallery for sculpture modelled on a large scale. That a great effort was made by an artist of power is evident, but the artist worked for his own ambition, and not for the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. He had no conception of the fact that the bridge and its environment were so good that they could not be improved by huge “embellishments.” Yet there are writers who say, “Yes, no doubt, Bernini’s bouncing figures are theatrical, but, after all, their general effect is grandiose.” The truth is, every great city needs a Parliament of Taste where questions of civic art could be debated publicly, with help from lantern slides. No writer can hope to do much in his defence of art. Indeed, books are studied so infrequently that they cannot draw public attention to the larger problems of architecture and decoration; whereas free debates in a Parliament of Taste, centring always around object-lessons, might restore to art the life of a great citizen.
In this matter we owe much to Hosking, the Victorian pontist, who cried out against the blunders made in the ornamentation of bridges. As early as 1842 he told the truth boldly, declaring that the most eminent civil engineers, in their efforts to take hints from street buildings, had failed to produce anything but meanness or absurdity, or a combination of both. Hosking had faith in three simple principles:—
1. That bridges, in the combination of their leading lines, should be bold and simple;
2. That their passage over dangerous places ought to be a secure highway; and,
3. That in stone bridges far too much money had been wasted on the high finish of exterior surfaces. In very ponderous language Hosking said:—
“It may be fairly questioned whether Waterloo and London bridges would not have been finer objects had the masonry of their external faces been merely rough-axed, or even left scabbled, instead of being fair hammer-dressed; and certainly many thousands of pounds might have been saved in the execution of Waterloo Bridge, and a much better result produced, by the omission of the coupled columns and their immediate accessories, and by the use of a plain parapet of a more reasonable height, instead of the high, the enormously expensive, and absurdly ugly balustraded enclosures which now aid the columns and their projected entablatures to deform a splendid structure.”
This Puritan outlook appeals to me, for I believe that good bridges should be as sternly efficient as were the Ironsides of Cromwell’s army. Their beauty is a thing apart from any cavalier-like finery of dressing ornament. It shows that all the parts of a bridge are co-ordinated with fine judgment, and that each part is in nice accord with its own work and with the great office which the bridge as a whole has to fulfil daily.
When the railway viaduct at Ludgate Hill was finished, there was a public outcry because of its gaunt and shabby ugliness; but Londoners were appeased as soon as some “decorative” metalwork was nailed upon the parapets. This “ornament,” a trumpery makeshift, was supposed to have given merit to an imbecile design that disgraced the main road to St. Paul’s Cathedral. As things of this sort are allowed to happen in the heart of our great city, who can have confidence in civic authorities? What chance is there that new projects for bridges will be considered intelligently?
In 1815, when Rennie began his bridge over the Thames at Southwark, neither the Government nor the City of London employed him; it was a Company that approved his designs, and financed the undertaking. At an expense of £800,000, three bad arches of cast-iron were put up from “elegant” stone piers and abutments; yet London was charmed by “a great feat of engineering,” partly because 5780 tons of ironwork had been employed, and partly because the central arch had a span of 240 ft. From 1819 to November 8, 1864, the Company was a toll gatherer on their industrial bridge; then the toll was done away with, and the Company received from the City an industrial compensation. Here is a financial adventure which might have been undertaken to benefit a small township which had in its neighbourhood some new ironworks and collieries. Still more farcical was the public lottery that helped to collect money for the building of the first Westminster Bridge, between 1738 and 1750. Even now, after many lessons from past follies, London has made more than one muddle over the project of St. Paul’s Bridge. Not even the Tower Bridge, with all its blatant defects, has enabled the City to be alert and clever as a pontist.