Flintshire Bridge [Pont Sir Y Fflint], Wales: Design Aesthetics and Innovation

Acclaimed winning design of the competition to devise the new River Dee crossing, the landmark Flintshire Bridge in Wales, United Kingdom, opened on March 6, 1998, by Her Majesty the Queen, defines new levels of excellence in engineering design and technology. A long-span, cable-stayed asymmetric concrete structure, it represents a radical resolution of major environmental, aesthetic, and technological problems, resulting in significant advances in the techniques of modern bridge building. A demonstration of the state of the art in civil engineering, it has won local and national praise. The impact of the use of concrete in relation to aesthetics, engineering, and architecture is discussed, in particular the use of a project as a pilot scheme for the development of a new specification for internally grouted posttensioned concrete following the collapse of a bridge in Wales due to corrosion. The innovation relating to the inherent instability of parallel strands (stay cables) in rain and light wind is discussed, together with the resulting innovations to overcome associated problems.