In 1502, Leonardo da Vinci wrote to Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire, proposing a monumental bridge across the Golden Horn in Constantinople. The design called for a single flattened arch spanning 240 metres, about ten times longer than any bridge of that era. It would be held together by compression alone, with no mortar or fasteners. The Sultan rejected it as impossibly ambitious. The sketch lay forgotten in the Topkapi Palace archives until its rediscovery in 1952.
In 1996, Norwegian painter Vebjørn Sand saw da Vinci's bridge sketch at a museum exhibition and became obsessed with building it. The location he chose was a pedestrian crossing over the E18 highway at Ås that locals had voted Norway's ugliest bridge. The Norwegian Public Roads Administration agreed to replace it, and Sand partnered with them to realize da Vinci's 500-year-old dream. It became the first civil engineering project in history built from a Leonardo da Vinci design.
The bridge was constructed from glue-laminated timber by the Moelven Group, using three parabolic arches instead of da Vinci's single one. It spans 109 metres in total with a 40-metre main span and cost approximately 12 million kroner. In November 2001, Queen Sonja unveiled it in a dramatic ceremony where cranes lifted a white cloth draped over the structure. In 2019, MIT engineers built a 3D-printed scale model of the original 1502 design and confirmed it was structurally sound. Da Vinci's bridge would have worked perfectly.
In 1996, Norwegian painter Vebjørn Sand saw da Vinci's bridge sketch at a museum exhibition and became obsessed with building it. The location he chose was a pedestrian crossing over the E18 highway at Ås that locals had voted Norway's ugliest bridge. The Norwegian Public Roads Administration agreed to replace it, and Sand partnered with them to realize da Vinci's 500-year-old dream. It became the first civil engineering project in history built from a Leonardo da Vinci design.
The bridge was constructed from glue-laminated timber by the Moelven Group, using three parabolic arches instead of da Vinci's single one. It spans 109 metres in total with a 40-metre main span and cost approximately 12 million kroner. In November 2001, Queen Sonja unveiled it in a dramatic ceremony where cranes lifted a white cloth draped over the structure. In 2019, MIT engineers built a 3D-printed scale model of the original 1502 design and confirmed it was structurally sound. Da Vinci's bridge would have worked perfectly.
