In 1502 AD, Sultan Bayezid II made a request, an open “contract”: he needed a huge bridge located in the Golden Horn area, connecting Istanbul and neighboring Galata. Leonardo da Vinci, already a renowned artist and inventor, was up to the challenge with an inventory lacking everything we consider necessary to build bridges: steel stakes, asphalt, wooden planks or even some kind of mortar to attach large architectural blocks.
But we forget about another “mortar” that can tie utopian ideas to reality: the human brain. Moreover, the brain in this story also belongs to the great scholar Leonardo da Vinci, an outstanding person in painting, sculpture, architecture, science, music, mathematics, literature, anatomy, geography, astronomy, botany and paleontology.
Leonardo Da Vinci.
Da Vinci presented the Sultan with a very novel bridge sketch, along with a description of the design and structure of the bridge. Sadly, the Sultan was not satisfied with da Vinci’s design. It won’t be until 500 years later that we can test ourselves to see if da Vinci’s bridge is really possible.
We are no longer surprised to learn that one of the greatest minds in human history was right again.
To conduct a detailed study of this architectural block, student Karly Bast, a recent graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Research, collaborated with architecture professor John Ochsendorf, with the help of her student Michelle Xie. They analyzed the remaining documents, studied the topography of the area, and then 3D printed the bridge in the design to see if it really stood.
The research results were published during the international conference on architecture taking place in Barcelona. In mid-November, da Vinci’s bridge will be featured in a lecture at MIT’s Draper lab.
In da Vinci’s time, most stone bridges had stone arches to form the curve of the bridge connecting the two water banks. da Vinci’s bridge was different from all bridges of the time, when it was so high that a sailboat could go under it. According to da Vinci’s outline, the bridge would be 280 meters long (he used a different unit of measurement, resulting in 280 meters); If this project is approved, da Vinci’s design will create the longest bridge, about 10 times the bridge of the time.
The design of the bridge also included an unusual way of stabilizing the bridge, to protect the bridge from forces that generate forces of unstable motion, such as a horse when it does not run in a straight line: da Vinci used use two wide-formed bridge legs as a contiguous place with the shore.
In da Vinci’s time, most stone bridges had stone arches to form the curve of the bridge connecting the two banks of water.
In his letter to the Sultan, da Vinci did not specify what materials he would use, but considering the materials that could be used at that time, he could only use stone because wood and brick would not be able to reach that far. . If the bridge is built like the ancient Romans, the bridge will rely on the Earth’s own gravity to stand, without needing any mortar.
The only binder is perhaps Leonardo da Vinci’s sublime intelligence.
To prove that the bridge really stands, the team reduced the actual scale of the bridge, from a few thousand stone blocks to 126 blocks, with a scale of 1/500, the bridge model would be only 81cm long. Each “stone” block is 3D printed, each block takes 6 hours to print.
“ It was very time consuming, but 3D printing allowed us to recreate this complex geometric structure ,” Ms. Bast said.
This is not the first time people have planned to turn da Vinci’s design into a real bridge, but most of these architectures use modern materials, so the feasibility of ancient drawings cannot be tested. that. “ The stone slabs of the bridge hold together just by force ,” Ms. Bast said.
They built a model bridge by the ancient stone bridge method, using a scaffold to support large “stones”, then put the keystone, the stone located at the highest point of the whole arch. kick – then remove the entire scaffold. da Vinci’s bridge model has stood, yet another testament to da Vinci’s genius mind.
Karly Bast with da Vinci’s bridge model.
“ This is the power of geometry. A very good and well-thought-out idea ,” the team said. Based on the feasibility of the bridge, it can be seen that Leonardo da Vinci carefully studied this problem, to come up with an advanced bridge construction solution at that time.
We cannot apply this design at the moment, because now there are more advanced ways to build bridges, using lighter materials than stone. But the bridge model built by the MIT team shows just how high the Renaissance architects could reach, despite their lack of building materials and deep understanding of the architecture. physics, geometry.