Golden Gate Bridge

5 Key excerpts on "Golden Gate Bridge"

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  eBook - ePub

  Bridge to Wonder

  Art as a Gospel of Beauty

  • Cecilia González-Andrieu(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Baylor University Press

    (Publisher)

  9

  The Bridge to Wonder Is Ours to Build

  I once sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge.

  When I was in college, a friend and I launched a laughably small and fragile catamaran out on the legendary San Francisco Bay. When we finally reached the bridge, we sat in awe of its towers rising above us over seven-hundred feet (about the size of a fifty-story building).1 The enormity of the bridge was breathtaking, but even more so was its intricacy. The structure is almost two miles long and supports a steady stream of heavy traffic by literally suspending it above the water. The bridge can do this because it was designed to be part of the bay’s ecosystem. As the wind blows, the cables that hold up the main span move with it. The cables can do this because they are not single structures but tightly bundled multiple strands of steel wire, almost thirty-thousand of them. During a particularly fierce storm, the massive bridge actually bowed six feet, mimicking the adaptability of the fragile branches of a jacaranda tree.2

  Along with the wind, the bridge also reacts to the sun, becoming a giant orange vermillion thermometer as the steel expands and contracts, moving the span up or down as much as sixteen feet; the bridge interprets the heat of the day or the cool of the evening. The Golden Gate Bridge is a community of intricately interlaced structures, itself existing in community with the natural world that surrounds it. The Golden Gate Bridge is art. The Golden Gate Bridge is also somehow religious.

  Art and religion, like the bridge, exist not as ends in themselves but as multistranded structures with a purpose. They are built from an abundance of distinct parts that also disclose a mysterious unity (1 Cor 12; Gal 3:28). The beauty of the bridge endures because of its relationship to the world it inhabits, its responsiveness to that world, and the care the human community it serves bestows upon it. Wind, cold, and heat would eventually destroy a rigid structure, but in the marvelous artfulness of the Golden Gate Bridge, it is the interlaced and nimble quality of its many parts that allows the bridge to react to what surrounds it. Through this relationship with nature, the bridge does not break but continues to do its beautiful work.

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  Icons of American Architecture

  From the Alamo to the World Trade Center [2 volumes]

  • Donald Langmead(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  The Golden Gate Bridge is an international icon at the popular level, but it also enjoys a place in the realm of high art. Interviewed in the 2004 PBS TV- movie, Golden Gate Bridge the historian Kevin Starr, observing that “great Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California 135 works of art encode within themselves messages that are at once transcendent and enigmatic, mysterious,” asked, “What does the Parthenon mean? What does Beethoven’s Ninth mean? What does Hamlet mean?” The Golden Gate Bridge means many things. It means the victory of San Fran- cisco over its environment. It means San Francisco remains competitive. It means that people can cross the channel more easily. But it also means something else. It celebrates in a mysterious way man’s creativity and the joy and wonder of being on this planet. Someone writing in a totally different context once said, “The light that shines the farthest abroad, is the light that shines the brightest at home.” And though the bridge, universally recognizable and admired, belongs in one sense to the whole world, it belongs especially to residents of the San Francisco Bay area, who feel this bridge as an entity and have a section for it. They admire its living grace, and its magnificent setting. They respond to its many moods—its warm and vibrant glow in the early sun, its seeming play with, or disdain of, incoming fog, its retiring shadowy form before the sunset, its lovely appearance in its lights at night. To its familiars it appears as the “Keeper of the Golden Gate.” 11 NOTES 1. Lowell, Waverly, and Linda Vida, “Bridging the Bay: Bridging the Campus.” www.lib.berkeley.edu/news_events/bridge/gate_6.html 2. Halpern, Dan, “A Serviceable Icon,” Architect Magazine (October 1, 2007). www.architectmagazine.com 3. Beyer, Sandra, “The Bridge That Couldn’t Be Built.” http://content.grin.com/ data/4/22383.pdf 4. Petroski, Henry, “Art and Iron and Steel,” American Scientist, 90(July-August 2002), 313.

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  Handbook of International Bridge Engineering

  • Wai-Fah Chen, Lian Duan, Wai-Fah Chen, Lian Duan(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  The landmark structure spanning the strait at the entrance to San Francisco Bay onto the Pacific Ocean is a three-span suspension bridge with a center span of 4200 ft (1280 m) and two side spans of 1125 ft (343 m). The Golden Gate Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world and held that distinction until the 1964 completion of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (main span 1298 m) in New York City. It is one of the best-known engineer- ing structures in the world and an internationally recognized icon of San Francisco, California, and the United States. Even today, it is still the second-longest suspension bridge main span in the United States. The Golden Gate Bridge is 90 ft (27 m) wide with six traffic lanes and pedestrian/bicycle lanes at both sides. The main cable diameter is 36.376 in (0.92 m). The 746 ft tall (227 m) towers consist of multicellular steel shafts braced with struts and were the tallest in the world for over 60 years until completion of the Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge (with towers 298 m tall) in Japan in 1998. The suspended structure consists of two parallel 25 ft deep (7.6 m) stiffening trusses, spaced at 90 ft (27 m). The bridge was designed by Charles Alton Ellis (Griggs and Francis 2010; Meiners 2001; Van Der Zee 1986). The suspension bridge was constructed by Pacific Bridge Company (main towers), Bethlehem Steel Company (structural steel of suspension span), John A. Roebling Sons Co. (cables of the suspen- sion span), and Barrett & Hilp (anchorages). The bridge opened on May 28, 1937. The bridge is owned by the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District. The original reinforced concrete deck was replaced by the orthotropic steel plate deck in 1986. The Golden Gate Bridge has been seismically retrofitted since 1997 and the last phase of the retrofit project is expected to be completed in 2015.

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  History of Technology Volume 26

  • Ian Inkster(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  1 0 P a s t a n d F u t u r e B r i d g e F a i l u r e s H E N R Y P E T R O S K I INTRODUCTION Bridges are among the most prominent and widely appreciated of engineering structures, providing as they do critical fixed links across bays, straits, rivers and other obstacles to quick and easy land transportation. Even in an age of air and space travel, a well-placed bridge can be an object of great wonder, admiration, and pride. New York's Brooklyn Bridge and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge are virtually synonymous with those cities, as are London's Tower Bridge and Sydney's Harbour Bridge. Indeed, at a time when cities across the world are vying for the attention of tourists and their travel budgets, a so-called signature bridge is often seen as a capital investment worth much more than its direct utilitarian value. Bridges are also great symbols of much more than a location or a destination. Great bridges, by nature of their achievement, lift up the spirits even of those who might never lay either eyes or feet upon them. Dreams of a bridge across the 50-mile-wide hostile environment of the Bering Strait, an idea that is over a century old, capture the imaginations of people around the world, as do plans to bridge the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the Italian mainland and to bridge the Strait of Gibraltar between Africa and Europe. These tremendous engineering challenges are technically achievable, but political and economic issues, which for centuries have delayed if not scrapped plans to build bridges, can still present greater obstacles than water and ice. Indeed, Gustav Lindenthal once said that 'it was possible to bridge the Atlantic Ocean, but impossible to finance such an undertaking'. 1 Most structures are not so grand in scale or ambition, of course, but even the smallest of bridges can be of enormous convenience and significance to a local community. And the collapse of any bridge is an event of no small consequence.

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  Earthquake Storms

  • John Dvorak(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Pegasus Books

    (Publisher)

  This was the general thinking behind construction in San Francisco at the time—until it came to the most challenging construction project of the era in California. In that case, concern about the San Andreas was of paramount importance because the project involved the building of a great bridge to span the mile-wide entrance to San Francisco Bay known as the Golden Gate.

  The narrow strait that connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean was once a river gorge that formed during a low stand of the sea during a recent ice age—the ocean shoreline then far to the west. During those frigid times, a large cap of ice covered much of North America and Europe. The subsequent melting of the ice cap caused the level of the sea to rise, drowning what, along the central California coast, were coastal hills whose tops are now the Farallon Islands. It also drowned the river gorge, giving us what is one of the most picturesque land and seascapes in the world. Eventually, the drowning of the gorge produced something else, something uniquely human: a temptation and desire to span the strait with a bridge.

  In 1921, Joseph Strauss, a prominent Chicago engineer and noted bridge builder, printed and distributed, at his own expense, a brochure entitled Bridging “the Golden Gate .” In it, he described how such a bridge could be built. Years followed as he revised his designs and lobbied for the necessary local, state, and federal approvals. Finally, on December 4, 1928, the state of California established the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District, which would oversee the building of such a bridge. Less than a year later, on August 15, 1929, the board of directors of the highway district officially named Strauss as its chief engineer.

  Early on, the state of California realized that the bridge would have to be financed by private money by the selling of public bonds. Thirty-five million dollars would be needed. But to issue such bonds, the state required the approval of voters. And it was Strauss who led the charge to get such approval.

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