Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Australia's Bridges: Sydney Harbour Bridge (1)

March 2011 (-33.852 deg., 151.211 deg.) Sydney Harbour Bridge (1)


The most famous bridge in Australia is the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I guess if you put a couple of iconic structures (the bridge and the opera house) in your city,  it can become a tourist destination. 

The nice thing about the Harbour Bridge is that it is really huge (the arch is 456 ft tall and 1650 ft long). You can see it from miles away and it suddenly pops up when you least expect it. Sydney is like a book of prints by Hokusai, only with the Harbour Bridge replacing Mt Fuji. 

The thing that bothers me is that arches are supposed to be in compression but I'm not sure what the top chord of this bridge is resisting. It stops abruptly without a clear load path!
Creative Commons License
Australia's Bridges: Sydney Harbour Bridge (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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