«Architecture of Bridges»

1933 - 1941

“Of all engineering structures, as part of the urban ensemble, the bridges stand most closely to architecture.

The architectonics of the bridges is not only peculiar and specific, but it also differs from the architectonics of civil and public buildings. The bridge, first of all, is an interesting engineering structure and owing to its diversity and extremely rich variety of structural design concepts represents one of the excellent tasks for an architect.

In the architecture of bridges the linking between architecture and engineering, on one part, complicates, and, on the other part, facilitates the designer’s task. It complicates in that it holds, to a certain degree, the architect’s creative intentions by its absolute logical and structural design concepts and stimulates the work of an architect by exceptional spatial properties and wealth of possible form-buildings.

In my compositions of “bridges” I allowed the possibility of realizing the many-tear and multifunctional bridges, where there are not only the lines of subways, buses, trolleybuses and other motor vehicles, where are working the cable railways, electric cars, moving sidewalks, industrial cars, etc. On my bridges I made a provision for a place designed for light planes”.

Iakov Chernikhov