almost invisible ink:a bridge, a corridor and a shelter roger mullin A path. Drive it, walk it, take it to be somewhere. When you’re on a path, you’re in the place you’re in. There’s no distinction between the path and the place itself. The path’s a minor clearing, a simple parting. But it’s a complex thing because it takes the shape of each place, intimately. A path in sand is more sand, sometimes rustled up; a path in earth is compressed earth; a path in stone is a slight leveling of the stones. Sometimes a path is nothing but an indication on a map, the reality having been blown or washed away. The path goes through places usually the most beautiful way so that when you’re on this way you can see beautiful things. Sometimes the path wanders about and you wander about with it. 1 — Roni Horn, 'Roads lack dedication'
1 infrastructure as bridge Inverted King Post Bridge, Ward Falls, Nova Scotia
Imagine the marvel of Roebling’s span over the East River in New York or a series purple planks, a wet and supporting passage across a stream; an order of business. In 2018, on the Bay of Fundy between the Minas Channel and the Minas Basin, in Spencer’s Island, in a workshop we grappled with spanning principles and many imaginative ideas. The building (that I'd built with a previous summer workshop group some years earlier) became an ideal classroom, near where we were camping and a 15 minute drive to the trailhead that leads to Ward Falls. Over 2 days we built several large-scale models of pre-cambered stress-skinned decks, tensegrity trusses and trestles for the 30-foot river span on our site, and presented them to a board member of the Cumberland Trail Head Association. With ten days left to finalise and build our design, as we set out on our first hike to this beautiful and remote waterfall we realised how arduous it would be to bring materials over a 3.5-kilometre foot path. Our workshop concepts now seemed heavy; our approach shifted to combine logs felled on site and a metal strut and cable assembly prefabricated at a shop twelve kilometres away in Parrsboro. On this site a previous bridge had failed during a spring melt, swept off its footings by a rush of water and ice from the canyon above. A partnership between the Harrison Forestry Company that grants public access to this part of their lands, and our group, allowed both access to the site and an improved bridge design.
Roger Mullin
1 Horn, Roni. Island zombie : Iceland writings Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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