Touching The Void

On certain misty, magical days, the Millau viaduct, the world's tallest roadway bridge, rises above the clouds as if it linked earth to heaven. In fact, it traverses the valley of the Tarn River in southern France, the highest of its seven slender pillars peaking at 343 m, 19 m taller than the Eiffel Tower. The trim steel-and-concrete bridge has a span of 2.5 km, creating a direct route from Clermont-Ferrand to Béziers near the Mediterranean coast, and serving, on average, 10,000 vehicles a day. Construction group Eiffage, which built and maintains the structure, expects this figure to rise to 25,000 during the summer holiday months.

Awesome yet elegant, the viaduct also makes less tangible connections: between art and science, and between the man-made and the natural worlds. "A work of man must fuse with nature," British architect Norman Foster said last December, shortly before the opening of the bridge. "The pillars had to look almost organic, like they had grown from the earth."

The opening ceremony itself was attended by French President Jacques Chirac, as well as citizens from at least four other European countries who worked together to construct a span that, in Foster's own words, has the "delicacy of a butterfly." After the recent squabbles over the E.U. budget and the proposed constitution, the Millau viaduct just goes to show what can be achieved when Europeans spend their time building bridges rather than burning them.

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