Why do I even own this book?

A lot of the esoteric books I own I got for free at work or were recommended to me when I was visiting bookstores, but this one I remember buying at Union Square. I paid money for this large book about the architecture of bridge design. And it’s not even about historical bridge design – although the introduction, by Hugh Pearman, does do somewhat of a survey of bridge design.

The premise of the book seems to be that, up until the late 20th Century, bridges were designed by engineers or by architects, but not both. When engineers designed bridges they were ugly – or architects covered up their functional components with cladding and other things that hid the nuts and bolts that kept them aloft.

In the late 20th Century, a school of bridge-building emerged which dictated that the engineering be revealed and be beautiful. And this book is a tribute to 30 of those bridges, the earliest designed in the 1980s, the latest in the late 90s. (The book was published in 2002.)

Now, I can appreciate a beautiful bridge as much as the next monkey and there are some truly amazing bridges in here: pedestrian bridges that float like a cloud across frozen streams (probably not frozen now, 20 years later); a drawbridge that folds horizontally like an accordion door instead of hinging up like the traditional drawbridge, or rising like one drawbridge here in NYC; a long, low, lingering bridge that connects a mainland city to a sandbar island, reminiscent of the Key Bridge or the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel that my friends and I went out of our way to drive over each year, despite the cost, because it was so awesome. But after a few pages, they all seem to run together.

I blame the book’s design. The san-serif font is hard to read, running the words together. And the layout, while clever – the landscape-oriented pages are split horizontally, pictures running along the bottom half like water, words traversing the top half – makes it particularly hard to focus and read. Pictures of the bridges, in situ, from the head, are interspersed with detail line drawing of a joint or ball-bearing. Perhaps of interest to architecture students or those who build bridges.

But for those of us who just appreciate them, a little dry.

Turning to the back flap of the jacket, I find this is part of a series. If I enjoyed this one – and had been paying attention in the early years of the century – I could have also added to my collection, Staircases or Architecture and Computers. (Although I suspect the latter may be a little quaint now.)

Sometimes I buy things because I like the idea of them better than the actual thing. Shoes are bad this way – they look so cool, with their swoops and studs and sequins and layered heels and tapestries, and they are sooooooo uncomfortable. Dresses and blouses can be this way, too. I look at them and think, Oh cool, I love how sculptural that is – yeah, for a size 4 who is 11 feet tall. Sometimes I walk down Madison Avenue from 96th Street and pause in front of the shop windows, picture myself in that thing that looks so cool on the mannequin and just laugh and laugh until I nearly die laughing.

This book is one of those things.

I suspect I bought it as a Christmas gift for my husband, who studied engineering for a while in college. He probably said, Oh cool, flipped through it once, and it ended up on the shelf.