Rheinbrücken / Rhine Bridges

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Manfred Sack, in an essay about bridges: ‚The
Latin word ›relegere‹ means to connect. The assumption
is that this is the basis of the word religion.
The chief priest in Rome was the pontifex
maximus, the highest builder of bridges between
man and god, between this world and the ›other
world‹. The Germanic tribes saw the bridge in
the rainbow physically before them, it was their
road of light to Valhalla. For those who are disheartened,
drugs are the bridge of escape into
other, very illusory, worlds of experience. Tradition
builds bridges from yesterday to tomorrow.
There are so many bridges: music, a letter, the
sounds of a radio, phone conversations, light
signals, Morse signals, calls. The building of bridges
is thus not only a physical process, but a
spiritual and emotional event, a longing felt by
the soul. No wonder that those who design and
calculate bridges, who build them and therefore
take risks, at least subconsciously sense some
of the extrasensory significance of their sensory
activity.‘
And this is all the more true when we are talking
about the bridges across the Rhine, the most
important European river, which is wreathed in
myths and legends and has inspired poetry and
music like no other. Until the 19th century it was
crossed almost exclusively by means of ferries.
With the onset of industrialization, more and
more goods had to be transported increasingly
rapidly. Today, over 250 bridges cross the river.
They too now shape the unsurpassed diversity
of the Rhine landscape.
Since 1987, Riehle has photographed some
150 Rhine bridges from the river’s headwaters
in Switzerland to the Rhine’s delta in the Netherlands.
The most interesting 100 bridges are
published in this book.
The son of an architect, Riehle was born in
1949 in Triberg in the Black Forest, studied industrial
design at the Folkwangschule für Gestaltung
in Essen from 1971 until 1975 and fine arts
at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1975 until
1980. In Düsseldorf he was the protégé of the
sculptor Erwin Heerich, who created highly noted
buildings on the Museum Insel Hombroich that
also shaped the artistic thinking of Riehle.
Gottfried Knapp worked as a film critic for ten
years before starting as art, architecture, and
film editor for the arts page of the Süddeutsche
Zeitung. His numerous publications on art-historical
and architectural themes include monographs
on individual buildings and catalogues
about painters, sculptors, draughtsmen, and photographic
artists. Knapp has won several journalism
prizes in the fields of architecture and monument
preservation.