Calatrava in Calgary

The bridge is not a typical Calatrava, at first blush I can’t see his hand in the design. When you buy a signature bridge from one of the guiding lights of bridge design, you want a Calatrava.

You want to point and say, “see the tower, the white ribs, definitetly a Calatrava”.

When you get Frank Gehry, you want a oddball, multi-surfaced structure.

Calatrava’s bridge reminds me of a bullet train from Japan or a Christmas candy cane. Its high contrast color does not seem to fit the home of the Calgary Stampede, the World’s largest rodeo. Check out more images of the bridge over at the pontist and let me know what you think of the bridge.

Prairie Style Bridge

I have just finished up a plan for a new Prairie style 2 span overhead bridge. I started to model my plan in Sketchup, both as a way to learn more about SU and to catch any mistakes in my design.

One of the things I am battling against is how “realistic” to model my bridge in SU. By that I mean, do I include the parabolic roadway grade, which leads to showing camber in the concrete beams, which leads to a varying concrete haunch. (The concrete between the deck and the beams, which helps in adjusting for the camber of the beam.)

Each wing is slightly different because of the 28 degree skew combined with the roadway grade. I don’t think anyone could see the small differences in a “accurate model” vs. a less refined drawing but I would like to see if it is possible to build a model that you could use to verify things like elevations.

I also downloaded a ruby script from here, which allows me to calculate volume quantities from groups or components in my SU model. This helps me check how accurate my concrete quantities. If you want to know more about ruby scripts, drop me a line.