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The "bridge to the 21^st century" was, perhaps, clinton's most delusional conceit, so it is not surprising that it would become clinton's self-referential metaphor of choice. His library was to be that bridge, if he had anything to say about it...

The architect is often the master of the inside joke, witness Robert Venturi's postmodern chairs. Venturi exploited--unabashedly and with abandon--the vocabulary of Las Vegas, its stage-set-as-reality and its roadside culture--bright, clashing, ugly and fake. The architect's inside joke is his hedge against the sycophancy that comes with patronage.

The flip side of the encoded meaning of the architect is the terrorist's decoding of it. To bin Laden, the World Trade Center was Jewish capitalism encoded in urban space. If Polshek's vision of clinton's library is a bridge, the inside joke is that, at best, it is a bridge to nowhere.

More likely, it is a bridge to the 7^th century...or a doublewide to house clinton double-speak. Take your choice.

Mia T, WRITTEN IN STONE: AN ARCHITECT DEFINES THE CLINTONS
The Virtual clinton Library

The Clinton Library (bridge to the 21st century) reminds me of this Pittsburgh story, The Fort Duquesne Bridge -- "The Bridge to Nowhere”.

When the bridge was first designed in 1956, everyone seemed excited about it. Engineers boasted that along with the Fort Pitt Bridge, it would be “the only known double-deck tiered-arch bridge in existence.” (That’s the kind of thing engineers boast about, apparently.)

But after construction began in 1959, a dispute emerged over where the ramps connecting the bridge to the North Side should go. The state favored building a ramp at Ridge Avenue, but according to a 1961 Pittsburgh Press account, the city was concerned about the fate of “residential property fronting on West Park [which] will be very valuable with North Side’s renewal,” a renewal that “a lot of traffic will detract from.”

The mystery in all this is why the two sides waited until construction was underway before deciding where the ramps would go. Perhaps they figured they’d cross that bridge -- or not -- when they came to it. In the end, the city won the argument: The ramps were shifted away from Ridge Avenue. But bureaucratic bickering and redesign took years, and the bridge didn’t open until October 1969. During that time, the roadway just stopped about 120 feet short on the northern end, and the Fort Duquesne Bridge became a running joke. In fact, jokes were about the only things that could run on it.

The first documented use of the phrase “bridge to nowhere” appears to be a May 29, 1960 news story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Reporter Mel Seidenberg observed that the bridge deserves a “special ... distinction among notable bridges of history.” That distinction: “the most expensive bridge ever built to carry auto traffic at high speeds directly into a dead end.” He then observed that while calling “it a ‘bridge to nowhere’ may be cutting the truth a bit short,” drivers were likely to end up in the Allegheny River or “on some obscure back street of the Lower Northside.”

Seidenberg wasn’t the only journalist to have fun at the bridge’s expense. In 1961, one Press journalist described the bridge as “one of the finest, double-decked fishing piers this side of Atlantic City.” Five years later, columnist Andrew Chancellor calculated that if the money spent constructing the bridge had just been put in a savings account paying 4 percent interest, the city would have earned $1.3 million (after deductions). Chancellor wryly suggested that the bridge could still turn a profit if billboards were mounted on it. ;)

In a way, though, the bridge became its own advertisement for the city. It was a kind of odd tourist attraction, the kind of place where natives shrug in affectionate embarrassment and say, “Oh, that ...” (Today we have the same attitude toward the Pittsburgh Pirates.) And though it may not have carried traffic, it did serve some purpose. As one Post-Gazette account recorded, “[P]ortions of the sturdy structure were used by some for lodging, others as a neat play spot and area for launching a 50-foot plunge into the Allegheny River.” There were stories of people trying to launch their cars Dukes of Hazard-style off the short end, which meant it helped play a Darwinian role of culling morons from the local gene pool.

The bridge even made an appearance in Roy Blount’s book About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, a loving depiction of the Pittsburgh Steelers and their hometown. “For years that bridge stood incomplete, 120 feet short of the North Side, and was called the Bridge to Nowhere,” Blount recalls. “Two different people moved the barricade aside during this period, and drove across to see if they could jump the gap. One car went 90 of the 120 feet before hitting the water.”

The bridge was so much a part of Pittsburgh that people seemed almost sad when it was completed. “Fort Duquesne Bridge (Sigh) is Open,” a Post-Gazette headline announced, with might be either relief or regret. Come to think of it, the Bridge to Nowhere was a perfect example of everything groups like the Riverlife Task Force think Pittsburgh needs: It offered housing (for vagrants), recreation and easy access to the river: All you had to do was jump. Today, meanwhile, all it does is carry cars back and forth.