Santiago Calatrava Essay

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The subject of this essay is the principles and strategies associated with the Santiago Calatrava Bridge Designs. Santiago Calatrava is Spanish born architect and engineer; he began his formal education in the arts at the age of eight. Calatrava used his knowledge in both fields to design aesthetic bridges using arch and cable technology. His early work was focused in Europe but, since 2005 he has been mainly working in the USA and Canada.
In 2009 the Samuel Beckett Bridge was opened. The bridge, which is supposed to resemble an asymmetric harp laid on its side, provided a dynamic branding to the city of Dublin. The bridge is a cable stayed, steel box girder structure with a span of 400 feet. There is a concrete support in the river which …show more content…

The Sundial Pedestrian Bridge is a cantilever cable-stayed bridge made from a combination of steel, glass and granite. As the name implies, the bridge’s 217 foot tall support tower acts as a giant sundial, telling time on a tile covered garden border on the north side. To Calatrava the bridge resembles a bird in flight and symbolizes the overcoming of adversity while celebrating human creativity and ingenuity. This is Calatrava’s first free-standing bridge in the United States. The deck of this pedestrian bridge is made from non-skid glass panels to give walkers a greater sense of the river. The deck’s truss bears the bulk of the bridge’s load, while the cables appear slack compared with those of other cable-stayed bridges. Construction on the Sundial Bridge brought along 5 years of engineering and fabrication challenges. Calatrava despised concrete; his design was a curvilinear creation of steel, granite, porcelain, and glass. In order to protect a major salmon-spawning habitat, the bridge was altered so that it would never touch the river. The decision to have no piers in the water bumped up the cost

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