Let me say right up front that I’m as happy as anyone that the new Demonbreun viaduct is open for business—five months ahead of schedule. I’m just disappointed in the form the viaduct has taken. Living as I do in the Near East, I’m glad that I can drive through the south side of the central city to the territory west of the Gulch without getting on the interstate or devising routes within the fractured grid of SoBro that would have challenged Lewis and Clark. And I’m pleased that I’ll finally—after two years of deconstruction and reconstruction—be able to pedal across the Shelby Bridge and in the viaduct’s bike lanes to attend my every-Wednesday-morning meeting on the Scarritt-Bennett campus. That is, if I survive the car-crazy overpass of I-24 on the East Bank, a traffic-engineered war zone still waiting for pacification. But I digress. I’m puzzled, however, by the civic euphoria that’s greeted the reopening of what is, after all, a 773-foot span of concrete. At the music-enhanced ribbon cutting last week, state and city officials on the dais seemed as elated as if they’d just driven the golden spike in the concluding segment of the transcontinental railroad. The First Baptist minister actually prayed over the thing. We could have used God’s assistance when the viaduct was being designed. As men in suits extolled the viaduct’s virtues, I couldn’t help recalling that, during the Bredesen administration, a different gaggle of bureaucrats had ardently campaigned for permanent demolition of the aging span. Its replacement was to be a six-lane swoopy curve south of Cummins Station as part of the infamous Franklin corridor in its pre-Gateway manifestation. It took a long and bitter campaign by a coalition of urban design advocates, many column inches in the Scene and the departure of the heads of Metro’s Planning and Public Works departments to tame the corridor and keep a Demonbreun viaduct. This history went uncelebrated at the grand opening. As an over-50, I’m cursed with a long memory. I’m also cursed with higher design expectations than the new viaduct delivers. When we were fighting to retain a Demonbreun viaduct, I don’t think any among us imagined one with choo choos on its legs. But choo choos we got. When Public Works abruptly closed the viaduct in 2004 because of safety concerns, the move took many by surprise, especially those who depend on the structure to deliver patrons to venues like the Frist Center and Cummins Station. Under pressure from these stakeholders, the mantra became: get it replaced, fast. The Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT), through which federal funds comprising 80 percent of the $8.3 million cost was funneled, was contracted to do basic design and administer the project. Gresham Smith & Partners was retained as engineering consultant. Public Works voluntarily included art funding in response to a report made by artist Jack Mackie to the Metro Arts Commission, which identified the viaduct as “the single largest public art opportunity along Demonbreun Street for the near future.” Hawkins Partners landscape architects were commissioned to work with Mackie on incorporating art into the structure. To make things nice for walkers, the right-of-way features sidewalks on both sides as well as pedestrian-scaled light standards. The public art component focused on the viaduct’s piers and the parapet walls that flank the deck. Design influences include the demolished train shed, the Art Deco styling of the Frist Center, historic railroad posters and the post-industrial styling of renovated buildings in the Gulch. A musical theme was also incorporated to reflect that the viaduct serves as a crucial link between Music Row and the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. For the parapet walls, the design establishes a rhythm that visually echoes the variations on a theme characteristic of music. The variants are the gable profile of the train shed and its inversion, a “V” that suggests the cowcatchers of historic trains. Deco-ish metal forms in the V/cowcatcher shape decorate the parapet at the places where the light standards and banner poles stand; those by the light standards are backlit. Below the viaduct’s deck, arched metal panels with night lighting fill the gaps between the beams. The piers feature reliefs of stylized locomotives. All of this sounds terribly thoughtful, but that’s the problem. It requires too much verbal explanation. And architecture succeeds or fails in the viewing, not the telling. The best way to get art into a viaduct is with first-rate, expressive bridge design. All of this sounds terribly thoughtful, but that’s the problem. It requires too much verbal explanation. And architecture succeeds or fails in the viewing, not the telling. The best way to get art into a viaduct is with first-rate, expressive bridge design. That we didn’t get such design isn’t the fault of the Hawkins team. The task with which they were presented wasn’t really to integrate art into the viaduct but to apply art to the typical TDOT overpass, to a structure already defined in terms of material (concrete) and form (box piers). In response, the team compiled a list of thematic and historical references and placed them on the piers and parapet walls. This is like an interior designer fashioning a “treatment” to disguise the banal shape of a tract house window. The art of architecture does not lie, however, with the concealing of the generic by means of the particular anecdote. That’s because architecture exists in space and not in the time of narrative. The conflating of these two commits what early 20th century architecture critic Geoffrey Scott calls the “Romantic Fallacy,” which attempts to adapt a poetic and literary sensibility to building. Such an approach distorts architecture by rendering it chiefly symbolic. Architecture, Scott writes, “ceases to be an immediate and direct source of enjoyment and becomes a mediate and indirect one.” The Brooklyn Bridge, for example, is an immediate and direct source of enjoyment. John A. Roebling’s design for this bridge doesn’t forgo all symbolism—the Gothic lancet arches of the two towers carry historical and aspirational allusions. But this symbolism is integrated into, not veneered over, the towers’ basic structure and exists in creative tension with the structural web of steel cables that at the time represented a decisive breakthrough in engineering. Roebling got what he said he was after—“a great work of art and a successful specimen of advanced bridge engineering” that has inspired encomiums by poets and painters ever since. And I doubt that the effect would have been enhanced by pictorial allusions on the towers to, say, the Dutch farmers who first settled Brooklyn or to the ferries that the bridge superseded. Bridges and viaducts vault over the earth rather than lie on it. The best designs for these structures, therefore, incarnate the human ambition to soar. We don’t have wings, so we use architecture and engineering to give us lift, to express how cunning and craft can triumph over gravity. Unfortunately, the new Demonbreun viaduct is all too earthbound.