Typology of Contemporary Cable Bridges toward Bridge Aesthetics

The importance of structural art has been gradually emphasized and thereby reflected in recent bridge design codes or guidelines through structural design principles in terms of safety, serviceability, constructability, economy, and aesthetics. This design trend has resulted in numerous variations of the basic bridge types and unprecedented types while leaving both good and bad examples. This study has focused on the typology of contemporary cable bridges focusing on bridge aesthetics. Specifically, this paper have provided the followings: (1) a typology for contemporary cable bridges so that the identification of important factors affecting visual appearance can be made on a structurally sound basis for the classified types; (2) an integrated framework for bridge aesthetics that supports a context-based design comprehensively; and (3) a way of evaluating bridge aesthetics using the integrated framework considering the triad of structural art of form·function·behaviour. The entity-based concept of information model is exploited to represent the typology to treat heterogeneous information in a consistent way. The relationship between structural and visual forms is explained using graphical approach. It is expected that this study will help multi-disciplinary participants to grow understanding of bridge aesthetics comprehensively for structural art work to go in the future.