Bad Form Leads to Tragic Function
I am never a fan of superfluous design, which is different than ornamentation. The "cables" on the university bridge were pretend cables to mimic a cable stay bridge. For the life of me I could not understand why they were not designed as structural elements, which would give them actual meaning and a certain redundancy in the structural design. Yes it is easy to armchair quarter back on this one but without even running a single computation the design looked "wrong" and the material selection wrong as well. The truss being constructed out of concrete is unusual-one would think that should be steel. The angle of the chords look bizarre and not right - I suppose the marrying of a truss and cable stay dictated the strange angles , in any event aesthetically it looks wrong- maybe that should have been the designers first hint that something was wrong -
Maybe the old adage "Form follows, function" should give more credit to having good form. Was there even an architect on this design? Was this a university student experiment?
