A watered-down vision

The tortured attempt to finish a new eastern half of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is looking more and more like a West Coast cousin of Manhattan’s Ground Zero: a rebuilding project at a prominent site that began with talk of bold, uplifting design only to be bogged down by a depressingly familiar kind of politics and profiteering. The new bridge, budgeted when it was approved in 1998 at $1.5 billion, is now pegged at $5.3 billion, with much of the extra money going to a multiheaded construction consortium and a long list of consultants.

At the same time, more than a decade and a half after Caltrans first contemplated a plan to replace the bridge, its design and financing remain in political limbo. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to scale it back to a towerless concrete viaduct rather than the self-anchored suspension version that is already under construction. And legislators in Sacramento have been scrambling to forge a compromise that would split the billions of dollars in cost overruns between the Bay Area and the rest of the state.

Thanks to the governor’s call for a design switch, the bridge debate has lately broken along party lines, a divide that was evident during often-shrill hearings at the state Capitol earlier this month. But this is no mere policy squabble. While politicians of both parties take rhetorical advantage of yet another construction delay, the fact remains that a powerful earthquake could cause large sections of the existing bridge, which was built in the 1930s on wooden pilings, to crumble. It’s important to keep in mind that switching from the suspension design approved in 1998 to a viaduct design won’t get the 2.2-mile bridge finished more quickly. Whichever design wins out, the new bridge isn’t likely to open until 2012 at the earliest -- eight years later than initially expected.

The architectural stakes are high too since the all-viaduct option promises to be a significant disappointment from a design point of view. It may be overstating the case to call it a “Soviet-style bridge” that will result in an “aesthetic Chernobyl,” as Jeremiah Hallisey, a member of the California Transportation Commission, declared in December. But its detractors are right to compare even the latest, refined version of the viaduct to a freeway on stilts. If built, it will be a lasting monument to lowered expectations, crowning a series of financial mistakes with an aesthetic one.

It will also be a reminder that when it comes to big public works projects and supremely valuable building sites, expedient deal-making of all kinds can still be counted on to trump forward-looking design. That’s true even after the much-hyped (and, given recent disappointments, perhaps over-hyped) design revolution kicked off eight years ago by Frank Gehry in Bilbao, Spain, and despite the heartening number of talented firms, including Thom Mayne’s Morphosis and Richard Meier & Partners, that have landed commissions from federal and state clients in recent years. (One of Mayne’s, ironically enough, was a district headquarters for Caltrans in downtown Los Angeles.) And it’s just as true in Sacramento as it’s proven to be where the World Trade Center towers once stood.

Fifteen years and counting

One section of the Bay Bridge’s eastern span, you’ll remember, collapsed during the Loma Prieta earthquake of October 1989, killing one motorist. It wasn’t until 1996 that then-Gov. Gray Davis announced that the state would retrofit the western half of the bridge, connecting San Francisco to Yerba Buena Island in the middle of the bay, and build a new version of the eastern section, from Yerba Buena to Oakland. In a series of packed public hearings in 1998, Bay Area residents made it clear in an early burst of post-Bilbao enthusiasm that they wanted a daring design for the eastern section, even if they had to pay significantly more in tolls to get it.

In June of that year, the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission, in a decision ratified by the state Legislature, chose a bridge by architects Donald MacDonald and Caspar Mol and a team of engineers. Their design features a viaduct for most of its length, sloping up from the Oakland toll plaza toward the middle of the bay. But then, in an elegant if unorthodox touch, it adds a soaring suspension tower very close to Yerba Buena Island. The tower is known as a “self-anchoring” suspension design because its cables, instead of being anchored to a point on land, are wrapped underneath the bridge’s deck. This feature, while it doesn’t make the design as unprecedented as its opponents would have you believe, has made it trickier and more expensive to build than a typical suspension bridge.

The current political fuss began when the tower portion, which makes up only about a sixth of the new bridge’s full length, was put out to bid. Exactly one reply came back: A consortium led by the American Bridge Co. offered last May to build the tower for $1.4 billion, or just about double Caltrans’ original estimate.

In the weeks that followed, the governor became convinced, apparently by a handful of consultants, that giving up on the tower and simply extending the viaduct all the way to Yerba Buena Island might save as much as $500 million -- even though work on the suspension design is already well underway. His appointees, led by Caltrans director Will Kempton and Sunne Wright McPeak, head of the state’s Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, began an all-out effort to define the self-anchoring suspension tower not just as expensive but also as radical and untested. Their goal has been to lay the project’s soaring cost entirely at the feet of overly ambitious design.

There has been one remarkable and mostly overlooked aspect of that campaign. When it was first considered in 1998, MacDonald’s design was attacked by residents and even politicians as uninspired. Many critics charged that it offered safe middle ground between a viaduct (even then, the preferred design among Caltrans officials) and an international competition.

Now, sadly enough, we are being asked to compromise on that compromise. Such is progress these days in cash-strapped Sacramento.

The advice that led the governor to call for a switch, meanwhile, is looking shakier by the day. Legislative analyst Elizabeth Hill, echoing the judgment of another independent audit, recently suggested that sticking with the suspension plan is financially less risky than changing to the viaduct at this late date. That’s not surprising, since changing course would require the state, among other complications, to tear the already finished infrastructure for the suspension design out of the bay.

Indeed, the only way that moving to a viaduct now will save money and not delay completion is if Caltrans manages to reverse, in a single job, a reputation for cost overruns and construction errors it has spent the last decade burnishing. A comparison to another apparently simple design is useful here. Caltrans is now preparing to finish a new bridge connecting Benicia to Martinez in the eastern reaches of the bay. It is a simple viaduct, with no towers or bells and whistles of any kind. First set at $286 million, its cost estimate has ballooned twice: to about $700 million in 2001 and most recently to $1.1 billion.

It is also six years behind schedule.

Form well beyond function

Sitting through the seemingly endless Sacramento hearings on the issue, it wasn’t tough to imagine how a more enlightened debate over the bridge design might have unfolded. First, a legislator might have reminded Schwarzenegger’s appointees that since 1989 there has been nothing less than a revolution in bridge design around the world, bringing the field back to a prominence it hasn’t enjoyed since the Bay Area’s famous pair of crossings opened in the 1930s. Architects such as Santiago Calatrava, Norman Foster and the British firm Wilkinson Eyre have created bridges that became instant landmarks and tourist attractions. These range in size from a footbridge by Calatrava (who is also trained as an engineer) in Redding, Calif., to Foster’s newly unveiled, approximately 8,200-foot-long Millau Viaduct, which spans a deep gorge in southern France. That stunning structure, which was privately financed, cost a relatively affordable $520 million, or about a 10th of the latest estimates for replacing one half of the Bay Bridge.

At the same time, innovative engineers such as Guy Nordenson in New York and Cecil Balmond and Werner Sobek in Europe have become well-known figures in their own rights, helping architects carry out daring designs at a huge scale. This while Caltrans has done its best to drag the reputation of engineers in the other direction, suggesting their job is merely to produce freeways and bridges that won’t fall down.

“The engineers at Caltrans used to be pioneers,” architect MacDonald says. “Now they won’t even look at a design if it hasn’t been done a million times before.”

Politicians in Sacramento only encourage that conservatism. Indeed, if there was one dismaying area of consensus at the bridge hearings, it was that aesthetics are at best a frill and at worst an effete and dangerous preoccupation; again and again, state senators and political appointees alike declared that they cared only about producing “the safest possible bridge at the lowest possible cost.”

In Sacramento, it has become conventional wisdom that the last thing any politician wants to be caught doing in the midst of this controversy is showing serious interest in the bridge’s aesthetics -- or being “French about it,” in the memorable words of one legislative aide I spoke with last week.

But what could be more shortsighted for a California politician, especially one from the Bay Area, than to suggest that how a bridge looks is wholly irrelevant? After all, the memorable design of the Golden Gate -- and, to a lesser extent, the Bay Bridge -- has not only helped give California an alluring reputation around the world but brought it untold mountains of revenue. A new landmark bridge would surely do the same, especially in an era of architectural tourism.

It would have been refreshing too for somebody to point out, however counterintuitive the suggestion may sound, that it’s precisely during tough economic times that it makes the most sense to make a design statement with a large-scale public project. The Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate were built in the middle of the Depression, as was the most successful collection of buildings in New York City: Rockefeller Center. Gehry’s museum in Bilbao, for its part, was commissioned specifically to help lift the Basque city out of its postindustrial economic malaise.

Finally, what was almost entirely missed in the Sacramento hearings, even by the supporters of the suspension bridge, was the fact that there are practical rather than fanciful reasons it looks the way it does. MacDonald’s design calls for a tower anchored on bedrock just off the eastern edge of Yerba Buena Island (from which a section of roadway about a third-of-a-mile long will hang) precisely so that it can avoid sinking piers into the deepest part of the bay. Suspension and cable-stayed bridges are designed, after all, for just this reason: to span bodies of water where it makes more sense to hold up the deck from above than below.

And a change to a viaduct design in this area of the bay could, in its own way, get quite messy. It would require sinking additional piers hundreds of feet below the bay’s surface. Complications with the same kind of pier construction helped make the Benicia bridge so expensive.

The suspension design is hardly perfect. Critics in 1998 were right to suggest that it’ll never come close to competing, in terms of sheer visual charisma, with the Golden Gate Bridge or new bridges by world-famous architects. But its tower is an elegant complement to those on the existing western span, and the design promises to handle seismic loads in an innovative way.

All in all, it offers an inventive solution to the unusual constraints posed by the fact that the land beneath the bay’s surface drops so steeply as it moves east from Yerba Buena Island.

In addition, there are growing indications that putting the suspension tower out for bid again would draw at least two and possibly more responses, rather than the single high bid that got this soap opera started. That could well lower the tower’s price significantly from $1.4 billion, in turn bringing the total bridge cost back below $5 billion. Conversely, there appears to be little competition shaping up for the job of extending the viaduct.

Caltrans and the governor should admit that cutting our (admittedly very high) losses and proceeding with the suspension design is the wiser option at this stage in the process. Indeed, that choice appears to be the more attractive as well as the more fiscally prudent way to go. And how many design debates offer a solution we can say that about?

Christopher Hawthorne is The Times’ architecture critic.