Notes from my Knapsack 1-20-22

Notes from my Knapsack 1-20-22
Jeff Gill

Something about a bridge
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My personal and professional bias has long been to emphasize the positive.

One reason is that there seems to be plenty of negativity out there, so I can stand out in what I like to think of as useful ways by looking on the bright side. Annoyingly so, I've been told, but I'm an unrepentant optimist, at least in public persona.

Internally, I can whine and complain with the best of y'all. Seriously, it's not hard, and the fact that it comes so easily is what makes me work at being chipper and upbeat. Curmudgeonly is an easy riff for a columnist, and that's a rut I want to avoid, since it might just become all consuming.

But then I heard or read a few comments about "our beautiful new bridge," and my inner Andy Rooney rose up in high dudgeon.

The bridge over Rt. 16, the Rt. 37 aka Lancaster Road bridge, is wider. It's better, that I wouldn't dispute. We needed more lanes, improved ramps. I'm glad it was built.

But beautiful?

Louis Sullivan said in 1896 "that form ever follows function." This architectural principle boiled down to "form follows function" has a Wikipedia page, and if you look up that page, you find a picture of a building on Newark's courthouse square. Go ahead, look it up.

Modernism and brutalism have their strengths and weaknesses as architectural schools, but one key element they communicate is that if you use glass and steel or concrete, let it show. Don't try to pretend your structure is something it isn't.

The attempts to pretend in pseudo-ornament that the new highway bridge at our village gateway is stonework manages to insult the viewer even as it fools no one. I don't get it, and I fear money was spent to make it look "pretty" when letting it look plain and honest might just wear better over time.

Alligator skin is more what the concrete panels bring to mind, inscribed to "resemble" stones, or a very small child's drawing of a stone wall. The similar panels to our west, on the Rt. 37 & 310 overpasses, are not improved by the mildew stains they tend to nurture and display to passersby.

And along with what the project description said would be "aesthetic harmonization" with nearby overpasses, there's how the name "Granville" was placed. The bridge slopes fairly significantly down from the south to the north, so a word put in alignment with the deck means it views from the road at an angle. To me, it just looks a bit . . . off. There's some humor in that the proclamation "Granville" leans to the right if you're driving west, but to the left heading east, and that might sum up our divided politics in some ways, but it just doesn't quite work for me. I get that if it's to be embossed in the concrete, that's how it had to go, but . . . could we have passed on the concrete, put up a sign on the level, even if we had to repaint or replace it every ten years or so?

So of course the lamps, the "ornamental lamps" on the bridge, are installed perpendicular to the deck, angled as it is. Meaning they aren't perpendicular to gravity, which makes me wonder long term how wise that was. Maybe there's not much metal or bolt strain compared to wind and rain, but again they just look a bit . . . off. Leaning, not in a Pisan sort of way.

In time, I'm sure this all will settle into the landscape as how it's always been, unremarkable and not worth comment. But for now, I felt a need to say this in print: vertical lamps, plain concrete, no fake stone marks, and at most some Ionic capital outlines lightly embossed at the tops of the pillars. Less would be more, along with form a little more closely following function.

What we have is trying to hard to be something it's not, and too late to change it. Which might be a lesson if not a metaphor for our community in its own right.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's no architect but he knows what he likes. Tell him why he's wrong if you like at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.