Research Information System
Fifth International Congress on Construction History, Chicago, United States Of America, 3 - 07 June 2015, vol.3, pp.75-83, (Full Text)
line"> <Bridging Golden Horn was a challenging engineering problem strived since Byzantine period because of the complicated physical conditions of the inlet. Nevertheless, this challenge had remained unsolved until technological threshold of the 19th century. After numerous short-lived wooden bridges, and two steel bridges (Galata and Unkapanı II bridges, 1875) the great leap forward was the construction of the third one (New Galata Bridge, 1912), which would be Istanbul’s first modern bridge on which tramway lines would cross and connect the both shores of Istanbul, and be the first modern floating bridge in the world. The second pontoon bridge for Golden Horn (Gazi Bridge, 1939) was designed in the early years of the Turkish Republic by Piegaud, the vice manager in Ecolé de Ponts et Chausses. Meanwhile, alternative projects had kept on being discussed. American Waddell & Hardesty Consulting Engineers proposal for Gazi Bridge was a vertical lifting deck, a type invented personally by Waddell and applied in many bridges in America since 1890s. Ernst Egli who taught architecture at the School of Fine Arts in Istanbul for long years also put forward a conceptual suspension bridge proposal. Proposals were vividly discussed in the newspapers of the 1930’s. Hence, the project had been not only a popular debate for engineering but also for urbanism and for architecture, on the eve of new planning for Istanbul by Prost and in pursuit of identity and representation of the new republican architecture. Within this framework, this article aims to convey the history of bridging the Golden Horn, which had been far beyond a sole problem of engineering. Together with built and unbuilt projects, it was a multifaceted discussion on engineering, architecture and technology, displaying not only the constructional problems but also the questions of transfer of technology and its social construction together with national identity.