Millau Viaduct by Foster + Partners is a colossal bridge that spans a valley in southern France.
Eleven years after its opening, -the Millau Viaduct was inaugurated on 14 December 2004, more than 46 million vehicles have crossed the bridge since it was opened to traffic. Spanning the River Tarn, which lies in a spectacular gorge between two high plateaux, the viaduct makes the minimum intervention in the landscape and combines function, technology and aesthetics in a graceful structural form.
 

Description of project by Foster + Partners

Bridges are often considered to belong to the realm of the engineer rather than that of the architect. But the architecture of infrastructure has a powerful impact on the environment and the Millau Viaduct, designed in close collaboration with structural engineers, illustrates how the architect can play an integral role in the design of bridges. It follows the Millennium Bridge over the River Thames in expressing a fascination with the relationship between function, technology and aesthetics in a graceful structural form.

Located in southern France, the bridge completes a hitherto missing link in the A75 autoroute from Clermont-Ferrand to Béziers across the Massif Central. The A75 now provides a direct, high-speed route from Paris to the Mediterranean coast and on to Barcelona. The bridge crosses the River Tarn, which runs through a spectacular gorge between two high plateaux. Interestingly, alternative readings of the topography suggested two possible structural approaches: to celebrate the act of crossing the river; or to articulate the challenge of spanning the 2.46 kilometres from one plateau to the other in the most economical and elegant manner. Although historically the river was the geological generator of the landscape, it is very narrow at this point, and so it was the second reading that suggested the most appropriate structural solution.

A cable-stayed, masted structure, the bridge is delicate, transparent, and has the optimum span between columns. Its construction broke several records: it has the highest pylons in the world, the highest road bridge deck in Europe, and it superceded the Eiffel Tower as the tallest structure in France. Each of its sections spans 342 metres and its piers range in height from 75 metres to 245 metres, with the masts rising a further 87 metres above the road deck. To accommodate the expansion and contraction of the concrete deck, each column splits into two thinner, more flexible columns below the roadway, forming an A-frame above deck level. The tapered form of the columns both expresses their structural loads and minimises their profile in elevation. Not only does this give the bridge a dramatic silhouette, but crucially, it also makes the minimum intervention in the landscape.

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Architects
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Foster + Partners
David Summerfield; Michel Virlogeux; Norman Foster
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Collaborator Architect
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Chapelet-Defol-Mousseigne
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Structural Engineer
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EEG (Europe Etudes Gecti), Sogelerg, SERF
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Client
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French Ministry of Equipment, Transport, Housing, Tourism and Sea
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Dates
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Appointment.- 1993
Completion.- 2004
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Size
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Height.- 270m
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Landscape Architect
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Agence TER
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Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.

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Published on: November 1, 2015
Cite: "Eleven years. Millau Viaduct by Foster + Partners" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/eleven-years-millau-viaduct-foster-partners> ISSN 1139-6415
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