Educating Engineers to Create Elegant Bridges

This paper defines principles intended to serve as a basis for teaching engineering students how to endow the bridges they design with good visual qualities. These principles were developed as a means of addressing the current situation in bridge design, in which engineers generally receive no formal education in the visual aspects of bridge design and the vast majority of bridges create visual impacts that are at best mediocre. Educating future engineers to design bridges of high visual quality can be best accomplished by shifting the focus away from signature bridges intended to make grandiose visual statements and concentrating on more practical works, abandoning the

notion of bridges as works of art in favour of a more realistic emphasis on the craft of bridge design, and by insisting that real improvements in technology are incorporated in every bridge, enabling each bridge to perform its function better than its predecessors.