Simple, elegant design could help define the city
With parabolic arch and spidery lattice, bridge would be like no other landmark in town
Dallas Morning News, The (TX)
June 4, 2003
Author: DAVID DILLON; Architecture Critic
Estimated printed pages: 2

Santiago Calatrava showed up at City Hall on Tuesday with a model of his new Woodall Rodgers bridge and very definite ideas about what it could do for Dallas.
It will be a link and a landmark, he explained, connecting the developed and undeveloped parts of the city and highlighting the importance of the Trinity River.

"It will not be a monument to itself," he said. "It will permit everybody to observe the value of the riverbed."

Mr. Calatrava is an architect and urbanist as well as an engineer, so he understands what bridges mean as well as how they work. They mark cities, define them and fix them in the collective memory. Try imagining San Francisco without the Golden Gate or New York without the Brooklyn Bridge.

Mr. Calatrava's preliminary design shows a steel-and-concrete span with cables strung from a single 300-foot parabolic arch. From the sides it will be a spidery lattice, from the ends a series of mysteriously dissolving cones. Either way, Dallas has never seen anything like it.

Mr. Calatrava is an admirer of Eero Saarinen, another great engineer/architect, and may have been thinking about his Gateway Arch in St. Louis while developing his own design. The Gateway Arch is purely symbolic, an unforgettable expression of boundless American optimism, while Mr. Calatrava's bridge has to carry six lanes of traffic. But it expresses a related kind of aspiration.

His new design is simpler and more elegant than the double-arched version he unveiled several years ago. What's not clear is what happens at the ends of the bridge - always a tricky issue - and whether it will have sidewalks and bike lanes.

Even if these require additional funding, they are absolutely essential. If Woodall Rodgers is to be Dallas' Golden Gate or Brooklyn Bridge, then people must be able to walk, jog, push and pedal across it. That's what public design means - something for everybody.

In his introductory remarks, Mr. Calatrava implied that Woodall Rodgers might not be his only Dallas bridge, that he can imagine a series of them up and down the Trinity. This is not necessarily a great idea, not because he isn't a brilliant designer, but because the city's long-term interests might not be served by creating a Calatrava museum. One function of a masterpiece is to inspire others to surpass it.