Il ponte come invenzione di un luogo nuovo, The bridge as the invention of a new place

Crossing the space of a bridge it is not unusual to think how the plane on which our feet rest appears as a place intimately linked to the earth and, at the same time, profoundly independent from it. Making immediately visible «the union of the separate [...] a bridge is felt in a landscape as a “picturesque” element». It raises the episodic nature of a condition offered almost casually by nature «to a unity, which is of a completely spiritual kind». Although through a world of forms attributable to the disciplinary domain of engineering, the conception of the bridge seems to be able to be fully referred to the experience of architecture. Sometimes and with luck, the morphological research that corresponds to it is only apparently confined to the honesty or objectivity of a technical-scientific knowledge, offering a far more problematic dimension of thought, which seems to follow the path of architectural creation. Through this point of view, the essay proposes a comparison between some important Swiss works created in the most recent season. These could help us to grasp more analytically the result of a research capable of welcoming and interpreting the forms and characters of a landscape in a profound critical dimension, never resolved in the desire to exhibit the honesty or prodigiousness of the structural form as a value in itself. Through the category of space, two projects for pedestrian walkways will be compared. These are city bridges, conceived as spaces called to connect some urban places separated by the natural course of the river. By virtue of the very different dimension of the river bed on which they stand, their forms build characters of the space that are strongly different from each other and, for this reason, inextricably linked to the different identity of the urban contexts with which they dialectically establish their confrontation.