A SPAN IN THE WORKS

By Belinda Luscombe

Of all the landmarks by which cities identify themselves, bridges are the most evocative. Prague has its Charles Bridge, Florence its Ponte Vecchio, San Francisco its Golden Gate. Bridges signify entry in a dramatic way that tunnels and ring roads simply cannot. So, as a way of projecting ideas for London's future, the Royal Academy asked seven European architects to design a new bridge for the Thames. Specifications: it should be inhabitable, which has set the city talking.

The nursery rhyme about London Bridge falling down didn't put the architects off elaborate schemes, and no ink was wasted on nostalgia. It was calculated that the 820-ft. bridge would need to carry 147,000 sq. ft. of shops and housing to be financially self-supporting, and the architects knew that obscuring the famous view from Waterloo to St. Paul's Cathedral would be fatal. Iraqi-born English architect Zaha Hadid's plan, which shared first prize with French designer Antoine Grumbach's, is all cantilevered glass and steel with the bulkiest parts of the structure at either end so as to interrupt the view as little as possible. Grumbach devised an open-air suspension bridge with a greenhouse at one end and a 500-ft. residential glass tower with hanging gardens at the other. Other proposals included a zig-zag span with a ribbon-like tower that twists 800 ft. into the sky and an organic tube in fluorescent pink and green that drew immediate comparisons to an alien spaceship. Nigel Coates, the only architect among the seven for whom Prince Charles has ever shown enthusiasm, designed what from river level looks like two acorns moored to the chassis of a racing car, but which the Daily Telegraph claimed would look from the air like "a giant phallus."

It's hard to imagine Londoners allowing such a dramatic intrusion onto their beloved brown river, but the romance of living on a bridge has caught the public imagination, aided by an exhibition of designs at the Academy, where visitors can vote for their favorite. Part of the attraction is no doubt novelty. Only 10 inhabited bridges remain in Europe out of hundreds built before the 16th century--an era when, for sanitary reasons, running water beneath one's window was a notable amenity. Finished in 1209, Old London Bridge boasted not only houses but shops, inns, mills and the decapitated heads of traitors until the 1750s, when the homes were removed because city planners decided that dropping waste into the river wasn't such a swell idea after all.

Despite the advent of indoor plumbing, there hasn't been an inhabitable bridge in London since. But because "the time has come to value [the Thames] properly," British environment minister John Gummer has vowed he'll do all he can to see an inhabitable bridge built by the millennium. Time will tell whether the idea of a modern home over the Thames is more than a castle in the air.

--Reported by Helen Gibson/London

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London