They are a team of 11, including a Swiss, a Chinese and an Italian, and one of their members, Juan José Arenas, des-cribes them as "a group of crazy young engineers doing great things." This despite the fact that his father, also Juan, head of the design firm Arenas & Associates, is 60, and one of the doyens of Spanish engineering. It is hard to travel far in Spain without crossing one of his bridges. Arenas Sr. smiles at his American-educated son's description, accepting the fact that the rest of the staff members are his juniors by decades, and that "crazy" means energetic. Beyond dispute is that the small firm — started by Arenas Sr. in 1999 in the northern city of Santander — is among the new wave of Spanish bridge designers.
The two most emblematic bridges by Arenas are the crossing of the Guadalquivir to the 1992 Expo site in Seville and a giant drawbridge in the port of Barcelona, inaugurated this July. At their apogee its two leaves, each weighing about 2,000 tons, reach 74 m above the water.
But while engineers have always built bridges — Arenas guesses he has designed between 150 and 200 — they have remained what he calls "the monks of the business." It is architects who have the high profile. He cites the example of engineer Eduardo Torroja, who from the 1920s to the 1960s designed some of Spain's finest bridges, aqueducts, churches and stadiums, but who is an unknown compared to Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí.
One day Arenas hopes there will be a European Institute of Structural Art, where both architects and engineers "can learn to share a common language of structure, rhythm and harmony." In Venice next April he will co-chair an international workshop called "The World of Bridges," looking at new building techniques.
Does he ever think there will be one across the 13 km of water separating Europe from Africa, a shorter distance than the bridge now linking Sweden and Denmark? "That's been discussed for ages, but the idea has been all but abandoned," he says. "Apart from the risks to shipping, the water in the Straits is 300 m deep in places."
Meanwhile, Arenas' "crazy" young team is exporting Spanish talent. Its latest design has just beaten some 80 others, including entries by Norman Foster and Santiago Calatrava, in a competition for a new bridge across the Tiber in Rome.
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