Description of the attraction
The Simone de Beauvoir pedestrian bridge is one of the new Parisian bridges. Soaring over busy quays, it leads pedestrians and cyclists from the square in front of the National Library of France right into Bercy Park.
An interesting story came out with this bridge. When in 1998 the architect Dietmar Feichtinger won the competition for the construction of a new crossing over the Seine, the bridge had the code name - Bercy-Tolbiak. Feichtinger came up with an elegant, graceful design. The single-span bridge looks amazing - as if two arcs are connected lenticularly and rise like a wave over the Seine.
The central span of the bridge, this very "lens", was made of steel in Alsace. It weighed 650 tons, was 106 meters long and 12 wide. The main part of the bridge was transported to Paris through the North Sea, the English Channel, then along the French rivers - slowly, difficult, some locks were too narrow for him. A long barge solemnly drove the "lens" to its destination, and by this time the mayor of Paris had already proposed to name the bridge after the writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In 2006, the bridge was inaugurated in the presence of Simone's adopted daughter, Sylvia Le Bon-de-Beauvoir.
It turned out funny - the bridge with soft, rounded, feminine forms was named after the ideologist of the feminist movement, a woman of high cold intellect, uncompromising, tough. The title looks like a mistake. But you can look at it differently.
The bridge is 304 meters long, as if in one breath, flies from coast to coast. Two arcs are two levels of the bridge, from the upper one there is a panoramic view of historic Paris, on the lower one the river water glistens. On the one hand, there is a repository of knowledge, on the other, nature, around beauty and freedom. Could Simone de Beauvoir be against it?
