MOVING BRIDGES

Given our travel schedule this week, this is another page of travel related drawing. I noted that I seem to have a fondness for moving bridges.

The example at the top of the page is of the Summer Street Retractile Bridge in Boston. Each roadway segment rolls on rails diagonally so as to open.

Although this bridge does not work anymore, all of the mechanisms and hardware are still there. So you can see how the bridge worked as you stand on it.

The example directly above is of the Samuel Beckett Bridge in Dublin, Ireland. This works by pivoting 90 degrees. The fact that the bridge even moved at all was not immediately apparent. It was only after noting the support pier and the radius in the pavement that it became clear that something was happening here.

Both of these drawings were done from photos I took days after the visit.

When you draw bridges, you are sort of drawing transparently already. Certainly in these two examples, with their light structures, they are transparent to begin with. The task then became to show how each of them moves.