Living Bridges: The Inhabited Bridge, Past, Present and Future

by Peter Murray

Until 1763 Old London Bridge boasted a famous parade of timber shops and houses on either side of a narrow street. Most of these had survived the Great Fire of London in 1666, but the nineteen piers built to bear the clusters of buildings above restricted the flow of the Thames to such an extent that the water roared through the arches as the tide turned, creating a dangerous weir for the many boats that plied the river. Two hundred years ago entire communities were supported on such habitable bridges throughout Europe. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they were demolished in favour of purely vehicular bridges. Living Bridges, the first book ever to be published on the subject, examines the contributions that inhabited bridges have made to city life from the Middle Ages to the present day, and explores the role they could play in the future. The history and construction of major inhabited bridges across Europe and North America are discussed in detail. In Europe these include Old London Bridge, the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, the Ponte di Rialto, Venice, and the Pont de Notre-Dame in Paris, as well as contemporary projects by Richard Rogers, Alsop and Stormer, SITE, Morphosis, Mario Bellini, Bernard Tschumi and other leading architects. The book is copiously illustrated and contains photographs of some of the specially commissioned large-scale models of twenty of the most notable "living bridges" in history, together with numerous reproductions of period drawings and paintings, as well as photographs of extant bridges.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1997

About the author

Librarian's Note: This is Peter^^Murray, with each ^ symbol signifying a space.

Born Peter John Murray in London in 1920, he died in 1992 in Farnborough (near Banbury), Warwickshire, United Kingdom.

Peter Murray was Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, from 1967 to 1980, and one of the principal founder members of the Association of Art Historians.

He was responsible for establishing history of art as an undergraduate discipline in the College, following Sir Nikolaus Pevsner's teaching of the subject outside a departmental structure.

When he died in 1992, his widow Linda Murray (a distinguished art historian in her own right) established a Bequest to provide funds for student support, research travel and other activities in the then Department of History of Art.

One of these activities has been the biennial Murray Memorial Lecture, which has been delivered by such notable figures as Jonathan Miller, Simon Schama, Neil Macgregor and Christopher Fraying.

The Murray Bequest also supports the Murray Research Studentship.

Reviews

[Iulia · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book and I think the only book which I've read so far on the topic of inhabited bridges. It contains lots of historical facts about previous versions of such kind of bridges before detailing the competition brief and projects from '96 regarding the building of an inhabited bridge on the river Thames in London.