A Bridge Too Far
by Patrick Field
There is a legend that, in the 1830's, when Isambard Kingdom Brunel supervised the digging of Box Tunnel he engineered it so the sun would shine through the two mile hole on one day each year: his birthday.
The (not quite true) story, and inferred comparison with the enigmatic monuments of pre-history, persists because it is entirely in character with Isambard's genius which did not differentiate between giving passengers on the magnificent Great Western Railway a smooth and rapid ride and making the entrances to its tunnels, or the architecture of its stations, distinctive and pleasing.
The Great Western Railway is a marvel of technology and imagination, nicknamed 'Brunel's billiard-table' for its constant gradients. It is the product of a period when art and science were indivisible elements of a unified philosophy; as much an artwork as the speed and steam paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner which take the GWR's bridges and locomotives as their subject matter.
During the Nineteenth Century, as technology grew more complex, fewer projects were supervised by a single brain. In collaborative endeavours artistic vision is often lost in a flood of detail.
By the end of the Nineteenth Century the split between art and science, form and function, romantic and classical thought, had begun to produce two distinct and separate cultures.
In the Twentieth Century an educated person no longer expected to understand all the workings of the World around them. Generalists -- Brunel designed tunnels, bridges and ships with equal confidence -- were replaced by specialists. In the Twentieth Century the aesthetic and the practical diverged and it became customary for the engineer, who made things go, and the stylist, who made them look attractive, to work separately.
Typical Twentieth Century products hide their mechanisms inside pseudo-space-age cases of metal or plastic. Their working parts are versions of devices invented years before. These may have been modified for better performance but rely on styling to make them appear up-to-date. If human society survives another fifty years the streamlined hairdryer, the aerodynamic food-processor and the automobile with fins, whose only purpose is to make it look like a rocket-ship, will come to symbolise the Twentieth Century just as the stove-pipe hat and the coal-powered steam-locomotive represent the one before.
The Romans would have admired Brunel's bridges and trackways but would I.K. Brunel have understood the speed hump? We are living in a period of profound cultural crisis in which deep desires and aspirations conflict; desires and aspirations that may be found within a single individual.
People who want to move quickly from place to place also want streets and neighbourhoods that are safe and tranquil. People who want to travel without difficulty or discomfort still hope to arrive at places that are remote, undiscovered and unspoilt.
These contradictions spring from a fractured philosophy, lives divided into work and leisure, persons split into minds and bodies, knowledge divided into art and science, perceptions of quality categorised as utility or aesthetics.
We are adrift between the past, when the task was to master the World, and the only plausible future, where the project has to be to preserve, nurture and sustain it. How is the ideological base of human-organisation to be re-unified?
A pedal-cycle can be sexed-up by stylists -- as in mid-century, American Cruiser bikes or that art-school favourite, the Raleigh Chopper -- but the size of the power-unit is fixed. You can train yourself up a bit but you can't decided to grow an extra lung. It is impossible to add a load of non-functional trim without compromising the machine's performance.
This performance is not recorded in some remote notion of energy-efficiency or fuel-consumption but by the very personal truths of pains in the legs and breathlessness. A bicycle-user is as likely as anyone else to enjoy beautiful objects but this will probably be complemented with a keen interest in the machine's function. The bicycle unifies aesthetic and technological considerations in a way that I.K would certainly have appreciated.
To use a bicycle is to bring mind and body together. To travel by bicycle is to blur the distinction between work and pleasure, and appreciate a unity of form and function. I have no route to paradise, but unlike the politicians who vie for our support with their credentials as managers and visions of the past rather than the future, we know in which direction it lies and even our preferred mode of travel towards it.
© Patrick Field
Cycling & Mountain Biking Today