Bridges connect places and spaces, but they can be great metaphors for connecting worlds and cultures as well. Besides, the construction techniques behind them can also be very intriguing as proved by the documentary "Gateways to New York - Othmar H. Ammann and His Bridges" (2019) directed by Martin Witz.
The documentary will be available to watch for free tonight as part of a special screening organised by the Architecture & Design Film Festival to celebrate NYCxDESIGN Design Days (the film will be available for 72 hours - in order to access the screening, please reserve a pass here).
Before the film, Gareth Brennan - president and founder of ADFF's presenting sponsor Eventscape - will share opening remarks alongside Ambassador Markus Börlin, Consulate General of Switzerland in New York. Afterward, Metropolis Editor-in-Chief Avinash Rajagopal will moderate a conversation and live audience Q&A with Claire Weisz of WXY Studio and Kai-Uwe Bergmann of BIG.
Witz's documentary focuses on Swiss-American civil engineer Othmar Hermann Ammann (1879-1965), from 1904, when he arrived from Switzerland to New York after completing his civil engineering degree at the Polytechnikum in Zürich. When Ammann arrived the city was booming and, while working on some projects for local firms, he started dreaming about more ambitious constructions, such as a bridge to connect Manhattan with the mainland.
Ammann focused on a variety of projects and he also assisted in writing the report investigating the collapse of the Quebec Cantilever Bridge in 1907. In this tragic accident that was mainly caused by inaccurate calculations, 75 men died, many of them were Mohawk steelworkers from the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal (they were buried at Kahnawake under crosses made of steel beams as shown also in the documentary).
Ammann was hired by Gustav Lindenthal and became his chief assistant on the design of the Hell Gate Bridge. In the meantime, Lindenthal had started developing a monumental bridge over the Hudson River, but Ammann disagreed on its dimensions. The bridge seemed indeed huge and Ammann was unable to convince Lindenthal to scale down the project, so in 1923 he left and set up his own office in New York City.
Ammann then developed his own plan on a more modest scale: he worked primarily on his own design for the Hudson River Bridge with no client to pay the bills and spent years researching, designing and going to town and political meetings, campaigning for the project.
His efforts were paid off when his simple, light and elegant design was given the green light: the dimensions of the bridge were unprecedented and the structure featured two monumental steel towers that were going to be covered with stone. The final design actually didn't include the stone ass, after the 1929 Great Depression, there were no sufficient funds and the simple steel structure was deemed as less expensive.
The George Washington Bridge was built between 1927 and 1931, and opened in October 1931 (six months ahead of schedule for less than the oritginal $60 million planned budget). Ammann's minimalism prompted him to become a precursor of the modern movement, setting the standard for what regarded bridges for the next fifty years.
In 1946, Ammann and Charles Whitney founded the firm Ammann & Whitney, but in the meantime Ammann's designs had already caught the attention of master builder Robert Moses, who drafted Ammann into his service. Ammann & Whitney also built for Moses large scale road systems.
Ammann also assisted in the building of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and went on to build further bridges in New York City, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge being the most intriguing one.
Opened in 1964 it had the world's longest suspended span of 4,260 feet (1,300 m) and was the world's heaviest suspension bridge of its time. Ammann also investigated the collapse of the Nacoma Narrows Bridge (Galloping Gertie), a research that allows the director to point out how civil engineering changed with time since in the past aerodynamic forces weren't studied nor researched when bridges were built.
There are some fascinating close-ups of bridges in the documentary and the focus is not just on Ammann's work, but on the actual workers as well. Some of them are also interviewed in the documentary: like the men who worked on the Quebec Cantilever Bridge, the workers who fearlessly built Ammann's bridges were Mohawk steelworkers.
There is actually a point made in the documentary about workers' safety: Witz shows us early workers moving without any protection cables on the bridges, then he reminds us that, when Ammann was called to rework on the Golden Gate Bridge, he fought to convince the company to approve safety nets under the bridge to protect the workers. Towards the end of the documentary, the camera follows instead modern workers carrying out maintenance operations on the bridges, secured with cables and hooks to emphasise how conditions have changed.
As a whole the film also touches upon other themes, from the Roaring Twenties and mass motorization to, the Great Depression, suburbanization, and the economic boom that led to modern consumer society. The director also explores the impact that buiding a bridge can have on a community and in particularly consequences such as expanding the land, expropriating houses and removing tenants.
Design-wise there are several intriguing points: the riveting phases are particularly interesting for jewellery designers, but so are the cable spinning phases (inspiring especially if you like to create string systems) consisting in taking a wire from a spool and draw it from one hand where it is fixed to the ground over the first tower, across the bridge, over the second tower and down to the second anchorage where you fix it.
Last but not least, the documentary teaches designers a lesson about simplicity: according to Ammann, a suspension bridge is indeed nothing more than a washing line, hung across two posts and fixed to the left and right, and "the clothes" hanging from it are represented by the suspended roadway.
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