European Thursday: Rotterdam and his landmark the Erasmus Bridge 🌉

I took the following picture while I was one of the drivers for my sister in her search for a weddingdress. This day I did walk together with my dad through the town of Rotterdam. We visited the city center, went to a Surf exposition and had some good talks together. I studied here at the Hogeschool of Rotterdam. But that is already more than ten years ago. In the meantime a lot has changed in the city. Buildings where demolished, rebuild or left empty places. But all for the good cause. The city has a lot of beautiful views and look throughs nowadays. One of the landmarks you can see from almost everywhere is the Erasmus Bridge. With a picture and a short story from this bridge I would love to join the European contest from @czechglobalhosts at this thursday.

Erasmus Bridge

The bridge is nowadays the symbol of the city, named after the well-known Humanist Erasmus. Making it one of the most famous objects build in the city. Since its completion in 1996 the bridge towers high above the river. Just like many other buildings in the city the bridge has a modern and special architecture. This bridge can be viewed from different positions and is beautifully lit at night.

They started to build the bridge with different intentions, the main objective was to connect two neighborhoods together namely de Kop van Zuid (head of the South) and the city center. The secondary objective was to create a more positive image for the city itself and get more exposure international. Not written as a main objective but as a side effect the bridge became a landmark
Because of the objectives the bridge was designed there were some great demands for the designer to accomplish. The design is done by Ben van Berkel.. There was a lot of discussion about the place that both architecture and appearance, technology and functionality had to take. What was more important?

The bridge is 800+ meters long and is a combination from a cable-stayed and bascule bridge. The cable-stayed section has a single asymmetrical pylon (139 meters high) with a prominent shape, earning the bridge its nickname “The Swan”.

The Bascule section has a span of 89 meters long, this part is for ships that can’t pass underneath the bridge.

When the bridge was opened by our Queen Beatrix on the sixth of September in 1996. Shortly after opening somewhere around October they discovered the bridge would swing under particularly strong wind conditions. To reduce this trembling they installed stronger shock absorbers.

Please Follow, Upvote and Resteem

If you like my content, don't forget to upvote this post and follow me for more every day life stories! Also, I will be happy if you leave a comment to tell me your thoughts and resteem this post to share my work!

Travelfeed

---

Learn more about our travel project on Steemit by clicking on the banner above and join our community on Discord. How does travelfeed work? Simple just use the tag #travelfeed in your travel posts (min. 250 words) for a chance to be curated!

---