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Design by Leonardo da Vinci Inspires Trail ProjectUniversity of Texas at Permian Basin officials are considering building a pedestrian bridge designed nearly 500 years ago by Italian artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci.
The bridge would be part of anticipated improvements to the university's jogging trail. Two sites are being considered.
"I saw a model of Leonardo's bridge in 1996 and completely fell in love with the beauty, design and graceful vision Leonardo had," Vebjrn Sand, a Norwegian artist who has built a full-scale model in Oslo, told the Odessa American. "He wanted to be the bridge builder of his time and age."
Best known for his painting Mona Lisa, da Vinci designed the bridge to be built over what is now Istanbul, Turkey, but it was never built.
Sand and Dan Hart, an architect with Odessa's Parkhill, Smith and Copper, showed a model of the bridge at a news conference last week.
They will determine how best to design a pedestrian bridge that has a West Texas feel, but still keep the unique da Vinci design.
One possible site is at the south end of the campus. The bridge would have an 8-foot span over the entrance with a total span of 200 feet with an estimated cost of about $1.5 million, Hart said.
The second possible site is over an arroyo, or drainage ditch, on the southeast end of the campus. The bridge span over the ditch area would be 40
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30/1/2005 | Viewed 7,511 time(s)
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