Cent ponts

One hundred bridges, one hundred spreads. Under the direction of Li Yuan, a collective of photographers and engineers documented one hundred remarkable works: each through one image and the drawing of its constructive logic. On one side the bridge seen, on the other the bridge understood — the span, the bearing, the line of forces. The book lives in this dialogue between form and the reason that holds it up. It sorts neither by country nor by era but by principle: what crosses resembles itself, from the stone deck to the steel cable-stay. Li Yuan refuses feat for feat's sake; she shows the intelligence of a right solution, the one that joins two banks with the least matter possible. A bridge is the very image of the house's gesture: to join what was separate. One hundred times, the work proves that one can connect with exactness.