Leonardo Da Vinci’s Golden Horn Bridge

Italian renaissance thinker, Leonardo da Vinci is still a famous artist, architect, engineer, scientist, naturalist and inventor. Some of his ideas were years ahead of their time, and Golden Horn Bridge is a perfect example of that.

In 1501, Leonardo da Vinci made a sketch of a 240-meters long single span bridge that was to be built over the Golden Horn – a natural inlet of the Bosphorus Strait dividing the city of Constantinople, present day Istanbul. This was the first time that such a long single span bridge was proposed. The construction methods that would be required to build such a structure would not come into use for another 300 years.

For five hundred years, Leonardo’s graceful design remained an obscure, tiny drawing in a corner of one of Leonardo’s voluminous notebooks, until 1996 when contemporary Norwegian artist, Vebjørn Sand, saw the drawing at an exhibition of Leonardo’s engineering designs. Sand was impressed by it that upon returning to Oslo, he proposed that the Norwegian Public Roads undertake the construction of the project, and so the Golden Horn Bridge was built in Norway.