THE ART JOURNAL FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE, ART HISTORY, AND THOUGHT

The Bridge from Which We Saw Dresden

On the new Carolabrücke and the difficult question of how a city continues to build between memory, identity, and the future

DOSSIERS

Rüdiger Steinhardt

9/15/202611 min read

The collapsed Carolabrücke over the Elbe, Dresden, 2024. Behind it, the city remains; ahead lies the question of how Dresden will build its next bridge. Photo: Inge Jann.

I often crossed the Carolabrücke without ever really thinking about the Carolabrücke. Most of the time, something else interested me. From there, I photographed the city’s towers, the silhouette of the Old Town in the evening light, sometimes the last colours of a sunset over the Elbe, sometimes only the lights reflected in the water at night. On New Year’s Eve, I stood at the railing with many others, waiting for the new year to begin over Dresden. The bridge itself was rarely the subject. It was the place from which I looked at the city.

Only when it was no longer there did I realise that this may be one of architecture’s most important qualities: it does not have to be constantly looked at in order to become part of the way we see. Some structures impose themselves upon a city’s memory; others carry that memory almost unnoticed. A bridge does both. It alters a skyline while at the same time creating the vantage point from which we perceive that skyline. It takes people from one bank to the other and eventually becomes a place in its own right. We drive across it, walk across it, stop there, take photographs, wait for someone or for midnight. Infrastructure becomes habit; habit becomes memory.

When part of the Carolabrücke collapsed into the Elbe in the early hours of September 11, 2024, it was therefore not simply a transport link that disappeared. Something that had become self-evident within the cityscape was suddenly no longer so. Particularly unsettling was the fact that the bridge had only recently undergone restoration work appropriate to its status as a listed monument. The central bridge section had been completed only in June. Built in 1971, the structure had by then come to be recognised as a monument of modernism; its broad span and, above all, its unusually low profile were valued precisely because they preserved views of Dresden’s historic skyline.

The collapse exposed, with brutal clarity, what architecture ordinarily conceals. A structure possesses not only a form but an inner life made up of concrete, steel, stresses, material fatigue, and time. Investigations attributed the partial collapse largely to stress-corrosion cracking in the prestressing tendons, whose origins reached back to the period of construction. While we talked about railings, proportions, and heritage protection, another history had been unfolding inside the structure. Architecture, after all, has both a visible and an invisible history.

A City and Its Lost Images

Few German cities have as complicated a relationship with their own appearance as Dresden. The destruction of the Second World War did not merely annihilate buildings here; it interrupted a continuity. What came afterwards was therefore never simply a matter of urban planning. It was always also a debate about which Dresden should be allowed to live on.

The Frauenkirche and the Neumarkt are the most obvious examples of the later desire to recover what had been lost. One can argue about reconstruction, about historical authenticity, about façades, and about whether a rebuilt form can genuinely restore what history has destroyed. But Dresden’s desire for recognisability should not be too readily dismissed as nostalgia. A city deprived of a substantial part of its built memory inevitably develops a different relationship with the past from one whose history could continue to be written without such a rupture.

This is precisely what makes the Carolabrücke so interesting. Its history demonstrates that Dresden has by no means always attempted to copy what was lost.

The first Carolabrücke belonged to the Dresden of the late nineteenth century. In May 1945, it was blown up by German troops. Other destroyed bridges across the Elbe were largely restored to their previous forms during the first post-war years, but the Carolabrücke initially remained incomplete. When increasing traffic decades later required an efficient north–south connection, the city did not choose to reconstruct the historic bridge. Dresden was given a new bridge for a new age.

The Carolabrücke that opened in 1971 was a work of modernism and of the GDR, technically and formally far removed from its predecessor. Yet its low construction also had something to do with historic Dresden: it was intended to interfere as little as possible with the city’s celebrated skyline. There is a remarkable continuity in this. The historic image was preserved not by imitating historical architecture, but by imposing restraint upon a modern structure. Decades later, this bridge too became a listed monument.

That should give us pause. It demonstrates just how fluid the concept of cultural heritage really is. What constitutes the present for one generation may already be history for the next. What once appears to be a modern intervention in a historic city can eventually become a protected part of that city itself.

Perhaps this is where the real question surrounding the new Carolabrücke begins.

How Much History Must a New Bridge Show?

For the replacement bridge, Dresden chose not to take the simplest route. Under considerable time pressure, the city could have opted for a far more conventional procurement process. Instead, four planning teams were commissioned to develop detailed proposals, an extensive panel of specialists was convened, and the public was involved in the discussion to an unusual degree.

In the end, two designs in particular came to dominate the debate, and they could hardly demonstrate more clearly how differently one can respond to the same city.

The expert panel awarded first place to the proposal by Leonhardt, Andrä und Partner together with Knight Architects. The design impressed through its slenderness, transparency, and an attitude of deliberate restraint towards the historic cityscape. The bridge was intended to be recognisable as a contemporary work of engineering without competing for attention with Dresden’s skyline.

The proposal by FHECOR and TSSB, which the expert panel placed second and which later secured the support of a majority of the City Council, takes a different approach. Its characteristic sequence of arches clearly evokes the history of Dresden’s bridges over the Elbe, and the earlier Carolabrücke in particular, without reconstructing it. The piers and abutments are to receive sandstone surfaces, while the structure itself is conceived as a modern steel-composite bridge. Historical memory and contemporary engineering are not to be kept apart but brought together in a new form.

What interests me about these two proposals is less the question of which one is more beautiful. More interesting is that both respond to the same historical situation and arrive at almost opposite conclusions.

One position might be expressed like this: a new bridge best respects Dresden by exercising restraint. The other: a new bridge may visibly declare that it belongs to Dresden.

Both positions are legitimate. Both are contemporary. And that is precisely why the dispute cannot be explained through a simple opposition between tradition and modernity.

Something more difficult is at stake: How visible must memory be before we recognise it as continuity?

Dresden knows the temptation of recognisability particularly well. Anyone walking through the reconstructed parts of the historic centre experiences a city that has devoted enormous cultural and financial energy to recovering lost images. There is an impressive fidelity to its own history in this. But every form of fidelity also carries a risk. A city can eventually know so precisely what it wants to look like that very little space remains for what it does not yet know.

How long can a city derive its identity from what it has recovered before it must once again risk creating something that possesses no memory at all?

Who Owns the Image of the City?

In Dresden, this question was not left to experts alone. The four proposals were presented publicly; there were exhibitions, citizens’ dialogues, “bridge cafés,” and programmes for schools. Ultimately, 25,887 people took part in the public vote. And something happened that changed the entire debate: the public did not favour the proposal by LAP and Knight Architects that the expert panel had ranked first. Instead, they preferred the second-place design by FHECOR and TSSB.

Suddenly, it was no longer only a bridge that was under discussion. The debate had become one about democracy and building culture. Who has the right to decide what a city looks like?

A structural engineer understands forces, spans, and material behaviour. Architects assess proportions, spatial sequences, and urban relationships. Heritage specialists understand historical contexts and sightlines. Transport planners must calculate what happens when trams, cars, bicycles, and pedestrians converge on one of Dresden’s most important crossings of the Elbe. A public vote cannot replace this expertise. But it does not follow that the experience of citizens is meaningless.

Someone who crosses a bridge every day, looks at the city from it, waits there, takes photographs, or stands at its railing with strangers on New Year’s Eve may possess no specialist knowledge of structural engineering. But that person possesses another kind of knowledge: the experience of place.

I believe it is a mistake to set these two forms of knowledge against one another. Democracy does not mean that structural calculations can be decided by majority vote. Conversely, professional expertise does not mean that the perceptions of the people for whom a city is built should be treated merely as a congenial supplement to a professional process.

This is precisely what makes Dresden’s decision so noteworthy. The public did not choose a technically absurd counterproposal over an ostensibly rational expert solution. It chose between professionally developed projects that the expert panel had both regarded as serious responses to the task. The conflict was not between reason and taste, but between different ways of weighting quality.

The accompanying committee subsequently again favoured the proposal by LAP and Knight Architects, albeit narrowly. The City Council ultimately voted 39 to 31 in favour of FHECOR and TSSB, thereby following the preference expressed in the public vote.

Whether this was the right architectural decision can hardly be answered conclusively today. But something important happened democratically: public participation had consequences. It was not merely a simulation of involvement whose result would subsequently disappear, without consequence, into a report.

That matters. It does not, however, automatically make the decision right. Democracy does not absolve us from the demand for quality. It merely changes the question of who is allowed to participate in defining it.

A Bridge Is Not a Sculpture

Amid all these discussions about history, identity, and the cityscape, something mundane must not be forgotten: the new Carolabrücke has to work.

It must carry trams, accommodate traffic flows, provide safe routes for pedestrians and cyclists, offer barrier-free access, respond to flood conditions, be durable and maintainable, and adapt to changes in mobility that we cannot yet fully anticipate. If it is to stand for a century, it will encounter needs for which, in 2026, we do not yet even have names.

This is precisely where the selected design becomes interesting. FHECOR and TSSB propose a modern steel-composite structure with a high degree of prefabrication. The continuous bridge deck is intended to allow future changes to traffic arrangements; the tram line and other uses can thus be organised more flexibly over the long term. At the same time, so-called city balconies are intended to create places where one does not simply cross the Elbe but can stop and look at the city.

To me, this small distinction is anything but incidental. Perhaps one day I will stand there again and take photographs.

A bridge, after all, is more than the shortest connection between two points. Good infrastructure recognises that people exceed its original function. A staircase becomes a meeting place, a square becomes a political space, a railway station becomes a memory, a bridge railing becomes a place where people wait together for the new year to begin.

Architecture cannot entirely plan such uses. But it can leave room for them. That, too, is part of being fit for the future.

The New Does Not Have to Look Foreign

For a long time, I believed that a city should visibly build its own time. Perhaps this conviction comes from my old affinity with architecture: every generation should have the courage to add something of its own rather than hide behind the forms of earlier generations. I still fundamentally believe this. Dresden, however, makes the proposition more complicated. Here it would be too easy to interpret every historical reference as backward-looking and every more abstract structure automatically as progress.

The FHECOR and TSSB proposal is not a reconstruction either. Its arches quote history, but they are produced with the materials, methods of calculation, and structural possibilities of our own time. Conversely, the more restrained solution by LAP and Knight Architects is by no means without history. Its very restraint towards the Old Town skyline continues an attitude that already shaped the Carolabrücke of 1971.

Perhaps, then, we have been using the wrong terms. This is not about past versus future. It is about what kind of relationship the future should establish with the past. That is a considerable difference.

A city does not automatically lose its identity when it allows a new form to emerge. But it may lose something of that identity if it begins to understand its history merely as a set of aesthetic rules. Identity is more than sandstone, arches, rooflines, or silhouettes. It consists equally of experiences, ruptures, mistakes, and transformations. The Dresden of the nineteenth century belongs to that identity, but so does Dresden after 1945, the architecture of the GDR, the reconstructions after German reunification, and the Dresden that today must think about cycle paths, climate adaptation, public space, and the mobility of the coming decades.

A living city cannot forever reproduce the image of itself that it loves most. At some point, it must add something to that image.

The Bridge That Has No Memories Yet

When I think of the Carolabrücke today, surprisingly, the first thing I see is not the collapsed concrete. I see the city from the bridge. Perhaps that explains why the discussion surrounding its replacement interests me more than the question of which proposal won a competition.

At first, no one will be able to miss the new Carolabrücke. No one has celebrated New Year’s Eve there. No one has travelled across it to work, arranged to meet someone at its railing, or photographed the Frauenkirche from it in the last light of day. It will be new, and newness has no memory yet.

That is not a weakness. It is the beginning of every structure that may one day come to belong to a city.

After 1945, Dresden learned painfully that architecture can restore memory. The Frauenkirche embodies this more clearly than almost any other building in Germany. The Carolabrücke now poses almost the opposite question: whether a city that has devoted so much energy to making what was lost visible again can place an equal degree of trust in something that does not yet possess a memory.

Perhaps the new Carolabrücke therefore needs neither to look like the past nor to demonstrate that it represents the future. It has to accomplish something more difficult. It must work, be allowed to age, withstand change, and give people a place they can gradually make their own.

And perhaps, one day, I will once again be standing at one of its railings as the sun disappears behind the towers and the city lights lie reflected upon the Elbe. I will probably photograph the skyline again, rather than the bridge.

If that happens, Dresden may well have made a good decision.

View from the Carolabrücke towards Dresden’s Old Town, just a few weeks before the partial collapse in September 2024. Photo: Rüdiger Steinhardt.

The first Carolabrücke with Dresden’s Old Town, 1898. Historical postcard, Brück & Sohn Kunstverlag. Image: CC0 / Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.