When a tourist boards a train heading south into the Alps on a summer morning from Zurich, they are first met with a vista of a gently sloping pastoral scene where cows munch on brilliantly green grass and occasionally cast mournful, almost wise brown eyes up at the passing carriages. Nature is at her most generous for at least an hour. The idyllic view gives way to something more serious just past the town of Chur. The verdant grass gradually gives way to a landscape scattered with rocks and debris.
By the train’s side, sheer granite rocks rise in abrupt canyons that are only broken by the sound of trees breaking and eagles cawing in. Families of pine trees cling to small ledges along improbably steep mountainsides like obedient soldiers keeping guard. Outside, we have traveled to a location that resembles one of Jupiter’s less friendly moons. Inside the carriage, everything is still as it was in the lowlands pictures of a lake are still neatly screwed to the wall by the door, and an apple juice bottle is still unopened on the table. There is a drop of hundreds of feet that terminates in a raging brown river choked with stones and brambles in a valley so steep that its gelatinous walls appear to have never been warmed by the sun.
A view stretches out along the train’s length as it curves around the mountainside, revealing that the burgundy-red locomotive has made the sudden decision to cross from one side of the valley to the other, several carriages ahead. It executes this manoeuvre without even stopping to consult with higher authorities. With the swift formality one could associate with the most mundane of activities to which prayer and devotion would be both unneeded and theatrical additions it passes through the gap and through a little cloud.
This incredible achievement has been made possible by a bridge that nothing in this environment could have prepared us for: a perfectly massive yet perfectly delicate concrete bridge that is pure and untouched, seemingly dropped from the sky by the gods. It is inconceivable that there would be a place for humans to rest their tools in this abandoned location. The bridge appears unaffected by the jagged rocks surrounding it, the naive attitudes of the river, or the hideous, twisted faces of the rock face. It is resigned to mediate the conflict between the two sides of the ravine in the manner of an unbiased arbiter, humble and voluntarily literal-minded about its own accomplishments, embarrassed lest it draw our notice or win our appreciation.
However, the bridge bears witness to the intimate relationship between our appreciation of strength and man-made items that can endure the deadly forces of wind, gravity, heat, and cold and how beautiful they may be. Thick slate roofs that defy hailstones to do their worst, coastal defenses that fend off seas battering them, and bolts, rivets, cables, beams, and buttresses are examples of beautiful structures. Edices, such as cathedrals, skyscrapers, hangars, tunnels, and pylons, elicit strong emotions in us since they make up for our shortcomings, including not being able to traverse mountains or transport cables over cities. We react emotionally to things that carry us over lengths we could never traverse, protect us from storms we could never predict, detect signals we could never hear with our own ears, and delicately hang off cliffs where we would quickly perish.
This implies that the perception of beauty we experience in an architectural piece may be directly correlated with the strength of the pressures it is up against. For instance, the emotional impact of a bridge spanning a swollen river is centered at the intersection of the piers, where they defy the ominously rising waters surrounding them. We find it unsettling to consider submerging our own feet in such tumultuous waters, and we honor the reinforced concrete of the bridge for its optimistic ability to reflect the currents that threaten to destroy it.
Similar to how a lighthouse’s heavy stone walls take on the demeanor of a gentle giant during a spiteful gale that tries its hardest to bring them down, we can feel something close to love for the aeronautical engineers who, in quiet moments in Bristol or Toulouse, designed dark grey aluminium wings that could soar through tempests with all the grace of a swan’s feathered ones. We feel just as secure as we did when our parents used to take us home in the wee hours of the morning. We would lie curled up on the backseat, covered in a blanket and wearing our pajamas, feeling the cold and blackness of the night through the window that we placed our cheek against. Something that is more powerful than we are has beauty.
However, beauty is usually the product of several attributes working together, thus strength by itself may not always ensure a bridge’s or a house’s appeal. Although Isambard Brunei’s Clifton Suspension bridge and Robert Maillart’s Salginatobel are both powerful structures that draw our admiration for safely guiding us over a precipice, Maillart’s bridge is more exquisite due to its remarkably deft and seemingly selfless performance of its function. Brunei’s construction, with its ponderous masonry and heavy steel chains, resembles a stocky middle-aged man who loudly calls attention to himself and hoists his trousers before leaping between two points, while Maillart’s bridge is more akin to a lithe athlete who leaps without fanfare and bows demurely to his audience before departing the stage.
Both bridges accomplish impressive feats, but Maillart’s has the extra benefit of appearing effortless in its accomplishment, which makes us wonder at it and appreciate it even more. The bridge is endowed with a kind of beauty known as elegance, which is a quality that appears whenever an architectural creation manages to perform an act of resistance holding, spanning, or sheltering with grace, economy, and strength; when it has the modesty to keep the challenges it has overcome hidden.