Nathan the Prophet and Zadok and Abiathar the Priests
“Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet: praise Him with the psaltery and harp.” Psalm 150:3
Spanish-Swiss architect Santiago Calatrava has designed over 40 bridges – Dublin has two (James Joyce and Samuel Beckett) – but The Chords Bridge was the first to carry both trains and pedestrians. Completed in 2008, it arches over a traffic junction next to Barchana Architects’ Yitzhak Navon Railway Station in northwest Jerusalem. A 188 metre high cantilevered pylon provides mathematically rigorous support for 66 steel cables which hold the bridge’s 30 metre long deck. Santiago relates, “The Jerusalem light rail train bridge project started with the idea that we had to create a very light and very transparent bridge which would span a major new plaza at the entry to Jerusalem.” His work is a stimulating addition to the cityscape, capturing the spirit of the age montaged onto an indigo sky. The Chords Bridge is clad in Jerusalem stone which accords with the architect’s penchant for pale. “Calatrava’s geminal iconoclastic experiments with structure and movement spring out of a long historical tradition,” shares Alexander Tzonis in Santiago Calatrava: The Poetics of Movement (1999). Make that implied, potential and physical movement.
“The architect compares the final result with the form of a musical instrument such as a harp with its cables as strings,” explains Philip Jodidio in Calatrava Complete Works 1979 to Today (2018), “an apt metaphor in the City of David. According to Moshe Safdie in Jerusalem The Future of the Past (1984), “What Bach did with the fugue, we must learn to do in architecture. I feel architecture can, however rarely, move us as deeply as music can.” Sometimes architecture really is frozen music, accompanied by a light cordial on the rocks. At the Cathedral of St George the Martyr, the Mother Church of the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem, The Very Reverend Canon Richard Sewell hoped, “We might hear the chord that calls us up to dance!” Or the voice of harpers harping with their harps. Sourires d’été en musique.
“You strum away on your harps like David and improvise on musical instruments.” Amos 6:5
(Extract with alternative imagery from the bestseller SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem and Tel Aviv)
