This book has all the elements to work really well: an overview of a complex yet accessible subject area (even if we don't know how to calculate the strength of a bridge, we all have a basic intuitive idea of how it must work and what it's meant to do) by an author who writes fluently and knows what he's talking about. And it does work well a lot of the time. But it has a few annoying problems.

We can probably blame the publishers for the rather minimal quota of illustrations (bridges are a gloriously visual topic, it's really a shame that we get so few pictures of those mentioned in the text) and for the ridiculous decision to ban any maths beyond basic arithmetic. Surely, almost everybody likely to pick up a book like this will have done some high-school maths and physics and be familiar at least with trig functions and simple calculus, both of which would have made the book a lot easier to understand.

However, what is clearly the author's fault is that the book tries to do too many different things at the same time, and ends up not quite doing any of them in a completely satisfying way. As a counterpart to the language metaphors he consistently uses to support his explanation of the different elements used in bridges and the way they work (or fail to work) structurally, Blockley tries to get us into a postmodern discussion of the connections between physical and metaphorical bridges (on occasion, even metaphysical ones). But he doesn't really have enough space - or enough examples - to build this into anything worthwhile, and it just ends up as rather pointless froth at the beginning and end of his chapters.

More substantively, Blockley also wants to spend some time on what seems to be his own main research interest, the way "joined-up thinking" about the process as a whole is crucial to the success and safety of big engineering projects. This makes interesting reading as far as the details of the case-studies he presents go, but when it starts to get more theoretical it feels very much like a watered-down version of a lecture from a generic management course, little of which is specific to bridges or even to engineering. ( )

Het eerste deel dat de bouw van bruggen beschrijft en hoe de kennis door de jaren heen is verbeterd is goed leesbaar en interessant. Daarna echter probeert de schrijver het idee van bruggen bouwen in brede zin te beschrijven. Bovendien laat hij dan zijn eigen ideeën over het ontwikkelen van bruggen en systemen in het algemeen los. Alsof er nog geen systeem architecten en PDCA cycli zijn. Dat maakt de tweede helft van het boek tot een overbodige beschrijving. Dat is slecht beschreven en gaat voorbij aan de moderne gedachten over Product Creatie Processen en verbeter processen. ( )