JAPANESE CABLE-STAYED BRIDGE DESIGN

About 80 major cable-stayed bridges (excluding aqueducts and footbridges) have now been completed in Japan, representing approximately one-third of the world total. Following early tentative designs, borrowing from experience overseas, major technical advances were made during the 1970s. Over the past decade, further technical improvements have been supplemented by exploitation of the aesthetic potential offered by this form. Tower designs, in particular, have shown increasingly dramatic styling, based either on references to forms in traditional architecture, or on a more ergonomically derived input from industrial designers. This Paper traces the trends in design of these bridges, limiting the discussion to road and rail bridge superstructures.