Civil Engineering Reference
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associate bridge designers, along with a description of at least three of their bridges. This inform-
ation was to serve as the basis for choosing a maximum of six finalists, who in the second stage
of the competition would each prepare a preliminary design for the bridge. The completion of this
stage of the competition with an acceptable design would secure the finalist twenty thousand dol-
lars toward the cost of services. An additional twenty-five thousand dollars was reserved for prize
money.
Twenty-one letters of interest were submitted, from engineering firms throughout the United
States and from a few engineers in Europe, and the selection committee chose six of them to be fi-
nalists. These included five American firms and the Swiss firm of Calatrava Valls, all of which were
required to submit a preliminary design within four months. More than just conceptual, these pre-
liminary designs were to contain sufficient detail so that the sizes of major structural components of
the bridge could be discussed and realistic cost estimates could be established. In the end, the Swiss
firm did not submit a design, but the five American firms did, and these were kept anonymous by
identifying them only as Entrants B through F. The fourteen-member selection jury included David
Billington and Christian Menn, the Swiss bridge engineer whose own designs are works of art.
Among the jury's major criteria for selecting a winning entry were “effectiveness in integrating
aesthetics, technology and economy”; “effectiveness in meeting the visual, symbolic, historical,
and functional goals of the site”; and “constructability, maintainability, and likely durability” of the
design. The jury found that all five entrants met the requirements of the program and rules, and it
chose for first prize and the design award the entry from the Towson, Maryland, firm of Greiner,
which specified twin steel trapezoidal box girders with a profile over the main span piers shaped
into a graceful haunch or deepening of the girder. Among the reasons the jury gave for choosing
this design was that “the shape of the girder in profile and the cross section of the superstructure
combine to create a graceful reflection of the geometry of the roadway and the forces on the struc-
ture. The superstructure will appear as a thin, curving ribbon arching over the Severn River.” The
jury did have some suggestions for refinements in the design, however, including combining two
awkward curves in the bridge into a single flowing curve, replacing the four columns under the
haunches with two, and removing the pylons that were included at each end of the bridge to serve
as “gateways to Annapolis,” the jury feeling that “the bridge itself should be the gateway.” The new
Severn River Bridge has now been in service for several years, and it appears to be everything that
the jury believed it would be.
It was the success of the competition that emboldened Maryland's Office of Bridge Development
to repeat the process for the replacement of the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge. The Maryland
Department of Transportation, in conjunction with the Virginia Department of Transportation, the
District of Columbia Department of Public Works, and the Federal Highway Administration, an-
nounced the new competition in 1998.
A memorandum of agreement, signed by the sponsoring agencies along with the National Park
Service, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and the state historic-preservation officers
of Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, set down design goals for the new Wilson
bridge. These began:
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