The Bridge

The purpose of symbolization is to free the meaning from the immediate situation, whereby it becomes a "cultural object", which may form part of more complex situation, or be moved to another place. All the three relationships imply that man gather the experienced meanings to create for himself an imago mundi or microcosmos which concretizes his world: Gathering evidently depends on symbolization, and implies a transposition of meanings to another place, which thereby becomes an existential "centre".

Visualization, complementation and symbolization are as aspects of the general processes of settling; and dwelling, in the existential sense of the word, depends on these functions. Heidegger illustrates the problem by means of the bridge a "building" which visualizes, symbolizes and gathers, and makes the environment become a unified whole. Thus he says: "The bridge swings over the stream with case and power. It does not just connect banks that are already there, the banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of the dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. Heidegger also describes what the bridge gathers and thereby uncovers its value as a symbol. We cannot here enter into these details, but want to emphasize that the landscape as such gets its value through the bridge. Before, the meaning of the landscape was "hidden", and the building of the bridge brings it out into the open. "The bridge gathers Being into a certain "location" that we may call a "place." This "place", however, did not exist as an entity before the bridge (although there were always many "sites" along the river-bank where it could arise), but comes-to-presence with and as the bridge. The existential purpose of building (architecture) is therefore to make a site become a place, that is, to uncover the meanings potentially present in the given environment.

- in genius loci towards a phenomenology of architecture

Is there potential in studying this idea concretezised in an installation, using the train-tracks and its banks (platforms) as an analogy for the stream. But...! WHAT is the BRIDGE?