A few days ago, I received an email from Michael Jennings about a Slate article, which concerned photography, intellectual property, and a bridge.  As far as my interests go, that’s: tick, tick, tick.

He commented on the piece thus:

This is quite interesting. The plagiarism aspect (or not) are one thing, but the shots of the Nanpu bridge in Shanghai are interesting in themselves. (You need to click all the way to the end of the slideshow - there are more photos of the bridge at the end).

Of course it is not the bridge itself that is interesting, but its approach from the western side. In built up cities beside rivers and harbours (particularly in the rich world where demolishing lots of buildings can be problematic) it can be very difficult to build new bridges not because of the engineering aspects of the bridges themselves, but due to the fact that the approaches to bridges take up a lot of space and that space in cities is often at a premium (and is often privately owned). You see fancy new bridges near docklands developments built on abandoned and semi-abandoned land, but seldom at the centre of cities). Tunnels are sometimes more expensive (although the gap between the cost of a tunnel and the cost of a bridge is dropping) but they require much less in the way of approaches, so new water crossings in rich cities these days tend to be tunnels rather than bridges. (For instance, when Sydney in the 1980s decided it needed to relieve congestion on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, a second bridge was never really a consideration and a tunnel was built. Similarly, nobody has built another bridge connecting Manhattan with other parts of New York or New Jersey for decades, but there have been new tunnel tubes).

Which is background to the extraordinary approaches to the Nanpu Bridge in Shanghai. Instead of straight approaches, the bridge has the gigantic corkscrew structure that you see in the photographs. (There are a number of places where the corkscrew can be entered at different heights).  Rather than using a large amount of space for approaches, making the approach sit vertically on top of itself reduces the area, and it changes the need from a long thin area to a square area.

That said, spectacular as the photographs are, I don’t think any of them come close to doing the structure justice. They all fail to capture the vertical qualities of the corkscrew - it is much higher than it feels in any of the photographs. If you stand in the middle of it, it towers above you, and they don’t get that.

Capturing any photograph of the entire structure at all is something of a challenge. Finding a vantage point high enough and far enough away from it to see all of it is extremely difficult (I didn’t succeed) and may require assistance from local building owners and/or police.  Getting the whole thing into a single photograph at the same time is then going to be difficult, and is going to require an SLR with a very wide lens.  This is going to mess up the depth of field - hence the photographs failing to properly capture the vertical aspects of the bridge.

Normally I think I would blog this and add a couple of photos of my own, but the truth is that although I don’t have anything more than a few shots of what look like a chunk of any elevated motorway.

Here and here are a couple of pictorial attempts to communicate the size of this structure, both of which I found among these.

One day they will build structures not by first erecting scaffolding, and huge and expensive cranes, and then piling heavy stuff on top of itself, but by filling the sky with toner powder and shining laser beams into it.  ZXZXZXZXZ!!!!  And there it will be.  All built, in a day.  When that happens putting new roads into the sky, on the top of thin columns which just stand in people’s gardens, will be easy.  Nobody will have to move.  The structures will just . . . appear!  Rivers will hardly register as barriers.  They’ll be like little streams under motorways now.  These roads in the sky will of course blot out the rays of the sun almost completely, but all progress comes at a price.  They can feed the suns rays through with mirrors, like that one they use to warm up that German town which would otherwise be permanently in shadow.