A bridge is the most generous thing we build. It asks nothing of the person crossing it. It just holds, quietly, for a hundred years, while cars and cyclists and kids on their way to school pass over the top and never once look down. And yet, when a bridge is done well, it becomes the thing the whole landscape is organized around. The river gets a frame. The gorge gets a horizon line. The city gets a silhouette.
We have been publishing Moss & Fog since 2009, and bridges have turned up in our pages more often than almost any other kind of structure. Some were record-breakers we could hardly believe were real. Some were tiny footbridges made of tree roots. A few never got built at all, and we still think about them. This is a tribute to the best of them, in one long, slow walk from one end to the other.
Everything here links back to the original story, where you will find more photographs, video, and the details we could not squeeze into a single paragraph. Think of this as the scenic route.
In this collection
- 01. Huajiang Canyon Bridge, China
- 02. Strait of Messina Bridge, Italy
- 03. China’s Bridge Boom
- 04. Gordie Howe International Bridge, Detroit and Windsor
- 05. The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco
- 06. Charles Kuonen Suspension Bridge, Switzerland
- 07. Huangchuan Three Gorges Glass Bridge, China
- 08. Ruyi Bridge, China
- 09. Lucky Knot Bridge, Changsha
- 10. The Infinite Bridge, Aarhus
- 11. Sölvesborg Bridge, Sweden
- 12. Millau Viaduct and the Bridges of the Future
- 13. The Living Root Bridges of Meghalaya
- 14. Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, California
- 15. Veluwemeer Aqueduct, Netherlands
- 16. Norway’s Submerged Floating Tunnel
- 17. Bridge in the Fog, by Łukasz Breitenbach
- 18. Building Bridges, by Lorenzo Quinn, Venice
- 19. The Garden Bridge, London
- 20. The Bridge of Togetherness, London
Part One
The Giants
Start with scale. The bridges in this first group are the ones that made us stop mid-scroll and check the numbers twice. They are tall enough to swallow skyscrapers and long enough to make islands into peninsulas.
No. 01
Huajiang Canyon Bridge, Guizhou, China
When this one opened in the autumn of 2025 it took the title of tallest bridge in the world, and it did not take it by a little. The deck hangs more than 2,000 feet over the Beipan River, roughly twice the height of the Eiffel Tower and nine times the clearance of the Golden Gate. A drive that used to take two hours along the canyon walls now takes about two minutes.
Our favorite detail is the load test. Before the bridge opened, engineers lined up more than ninety fully loaded trucks on the deck and let them sit there. There is a glass-floored visitor center at one end for anyone who wants to look straight down. We are still deciding whether we would.
No. 02
The Strait of Messina Bridge, Sicily to Calabria, Italy
Italy has been talking about bridging the Strait of Messina since Roman times, and in 2025 the project finally got its approval. If it is built as drawn, it will have a suspended span of 3.3 kilometers, comfortably the longest on Earth, hung from two towers nearly 400 meters tall. Six lanes of traffic, two rail lines, and a 200-year design life, in a place known for wind and earthquakes.
What we love about the design is how little it tries to do. No flourishes, no swoops. Just two towers, two cables, and a very long, very calm line across the water. Bridges of this scale tend to age well when they keep things plain, and this one looks like it will.
No. 03
China’s Bridge Boom
Back in 2017 we wrote about a New York Times feature on the sheer number of enormous bridges going up across China, and it has only become more true since. At the time, one bridge enthusiast put it this way: China was opening around fifty high bridges a year, and the rest of the world combined was opening about ten. Of the hundred highest bridges on Earth, eighty-one were Chinese.
The story is complicated, with real questions about debt and whether every one of those bridges was needed. But the photography was extraordinary, and it set us up for nearly a decade of watching Chinese bridge records fall, one after another. Several of them appear later in this list.
No. 04
Gordie Howe International Bridge, Detroit to Windsor
Border crossings are usually the ugliest pieces of infrastructure a country builds, which is exactly why this one caught us. The Gordie Howe bridge, which opened to traffic in July 2026, is now the longest cable-stayed bridge in North America, with an 853-meter main span held up by 216 bright white cables. The towers are subtly bent in homage to the hockey legend it is named for.
There is public art from First Nations artists on the Canadian side and Detroit muralists on the American side, a lighting scheme by the novelist and artist Douglas Coupland, and a dedicated path so you can walk or cycle from one country to the other. It is a bridge that seems to believe the crossing itself should be worth something.
Part Two
The Icon
Every list of bridges eventually arrives here. Given the name of this site, we have a soft spot for anything that disappears into fog on a regular basis, and nothing does it quite like the Golden Gate. It never gets old.
No. 05
The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco
Opened in 1937 with 8,981 feet of deck and towers rising 746 feet above the water, it was for decades both the longest and the tallest suspension bridge in the world. The color was a fight. The military wanted it painted for maximum visibility to ships and aircraft, and bold stripes were seriously proposed. Irving Morrow, the architect brought in mostly to handle aesthetics, won the argument with the burnt-orange we now cannot imagine it without.
Our piece on the bridge’s 75th anniversary also tells the less flattering story of Charles Ellis, the engineer who did most of the actual math and was fired months before completion in what looks like a dispute over credit. He went unmentioned on the dedication plaque for 75 years. Landmarks are almost always more collaborative, and occasionally more unjust, than the postcard lets on.
Part Three
Bridges You Cross With Your Heart in Your Throat
Some bridges are for cars. These are for people, and specifically for people who want to feel something. Glass floors, two-foot-wide decks, valleys full of mist a few hundred feet below your shoes.
No. 06
Charles Kuonen Suspension Bridge, Switzerland
When it opened in 2017 this was the longest pedestrian suspension bridge in the world: 494 meters of steel mesh deck strung between two sections of the trail from Grächen to Zermatt. The whole thing was built in about ten weeks. It is only two feet wide, so you cross in single file, with the Alps wrapped around you in every direction and the valley a very long way down.
We asked readers whether they would take the walk. Most said yes. A vocal minority said absolutely not, and then kept looking at the photos anyway.
No. 07
The Huangchuan Three Gorges Glass Bridge, China
A 526-meter footbridge with a floor made entirely of glass, suspended 200 meters over the Lianjiang River. The designers talked about giving the deck a crystal-like lustre and blending the structure into the landscape, which is a very calm way to describe a walk that would have most of us gripping the handrail.
The red towers are what make it. Everything else is transparent, so the structure reads as two bold brushstrokes with nothing much between them.
No. 08
Ruyi Bridge, Zhejiang, China
Named for the ruyi, a curved ceremonial scepter that stands for good fortune, this bridge braids three separate walkways over a limestone valley in the Shenxianju Scenic Area. It is 140 meters long and 140 meters high, with a glass section in the middle span and three viewing platforms. It went viral the moment it opened in 2020, and it deserved to.
The shape looks like something a concept artist would be told to tone down. Then the fog rolls through the valley beneath it and it looks exactly right. It is a bridge that knows it is beautiful and does not apologize for it.
Part Four
Bridges as Sculpture
At a certain point a bridge stops being infrastructure and becomes a public artwork you happen to be able to walk on. These are the ones that made us think about form first and function a close second.
No. 09
Lucky Knot Bridge, Changsha, China
NEXT Architects took the Möbius strip and the ancient Chinese art of knotting and made a bridge out of both. Three separate walkways at different heights twist and loop over the Dragon King Harbour River, so you can wander up and over and back without ever quite taking the direct route. It is painted a red that glows against the gray city around it.
We wrote at the time that it might put Changsha, a city of seven million we knew almost nothing about, on the international design map. It did.
No. 10
The Infinite Bridge, Aarhus, Denmark
A bridge that goes nowhere, on purpose. Gjøde & Povlsgaard Arkitekter built a 60-meter circle of timber decking half on the beach and half out over the shallows near Aarhus, so that walking it becomes a slow, continuous panorama of the bay. Locals adopted it immediately. Kids ran laps. Adults sat with their feet over the edge.
It is the gentlest entry on this list, and one of the ones we think about most.
No. 11
Sölvesborg Bridge, Sweden
By day the Sölvesborg bridge is a handsome set of steel arches carrying cyclists and pedestrians across a Swedish bay. By night, thanks to a lighting design by Ljusarkitektur, it becomes something else entirely. Color-changing LEDs, carefully diffused to kill glare, turn the arches into slow-shifting bands of violet and blue that double themselves in the water.
We covered this back in 2013 and it remains one of the best arguments we know for treating lighting as architecture rather than an afterthought.
No. 12
The Millau Viaduct, and the Bridges of the Future
One of our earliest bridge posts, from 2012, was a simple roundup of the most forward-looking bridges we could find. The star was the Millau Viaduct in southern France, a road bridge carried across the Tarn valley on seven piers so slender it looks like it has been drawn in with a ruler. Measured from the ground to the tip of its tallest mast, it stands higher than the Eiffel Tower. When the valley fills with cloud, the road appears to float.
The same post gathered the Henderson Waves in Singapore, the Sundial Bridge in California, the Gateshead Millennium Bridge that tilts open like an eyelid, and the Øresund crossing that turns into a tunnel halfway between Denmark and Sweden. Fourteen years later, every one of them still looks like the future.
Part Five
Bridges That Grow, Bridges for Animals, Bridges for Boats
Not every bridge carries people. Some carry mountain lions. Some carry sailboats over a motorway. And at least one group of them is alive.
No. 13
The Living Root Bridges of Meghalaya, India
In the wettest hills on Earth, the Khasi and Jaintia people figured out centuries ago that a bamboo bridge would simply wash away in the monsoon. So they grew their bridges instead. The aerial roots of the rubber fig tree are guided across a stream, woven, and tied, and over fifteen or twenty years they thicken into a walkway that gets stronger every season rather than weaker.
More than sixty of them exist, including a handful that are two stories tall. They are the only bridges in this collection that were never finished, because they are still growing.
No. 14
Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, Agoura Hills, California
The largest wildlife crossing in the world is a bridge over ten lanes of Los Angeles freeway that no person is meant to use. It is planted with native chaparral and oaks so that, from an animal’s point of view, the mountain simply continues. Mountain lions, bobcats, deer, and more than a dozen other species that had been trapped on either side of the 101 get their range back.
We covered the groundbreaking in 2024. Of every bridge in this collection, this is the one we are most excited to see finished.
No. 15
Veluwemeer Aqueduct, Harderwijk, Netherlands
It looks like a rendering glitch. A motorway dips slightly, a channel of lake water passes over the top of it, and a sailboat glides across while traffic keeps moving beneath. The Veluwemeer Aqueduct is only 25 meters long and three meters deep, and it has been quietly doing exactly this since 2002, connecting two Dutch lakes without interrupting a single car.
Only the Dutch, who have spent a thousand years negotiating with water, would solve a traffic problem this way and then treat it as unremarkable.
No. 16
The Submerged Floating Tunnel, Norway
Is it a bridge or a tunnel? Norway’s answer is both. To cut the drive along its ragged western coast, the country has been studying tubes that hang about 100 feet beneath the surface of the deepest fjords, tethered to floating pontoons above, so that ships pass over and cars pass through. It is a bridge you cannot see from the shore.
We covered the concept in 2016, when it was slated for completion sometime in the 2030s. It remains one of the strangest and most elegant infrastructure ideas we have ever published.
Part Six
Bridges as Art and Idea
Two entries where the bridge is the subject rather than the structure. One is a series of photographs. The other is six pairs of enormous hands.
No. 17
Bridge in the Fog, by Łukasz Breitenbach
We were always going to fall for these. Polish photographer Łukasz Breitenbach shot a highway bridge from underneath on a morning when the fog was thick enough to erase the far end of it. A man walks a dog. A figure stands beneath a pier. The concrete rises and simply stops.
No records here, no engineering feats. Just a reminder that a bridge seen from below, half-erased, can be as beautiful as any seen from the air.
No. 18
Building Bridges, by Lorenzo Quinn, Venice
For the 2019 Venice Biennale, sculptor Lorenzo Quinn spanned a canal in the Arsenale with six pairs of monumental white hands, each pair reaching from one bank to clasp the other. Each was named for a value: Friendship, Wisdom, Help, Faith, Hope, and Love. It was uplifting in a way that public art rarely manages without tipping into sentimentality.
It is the only entry here you could not cross. Boats passed beneath it instead, which felt right for Venice.
Part Seven
The Ones That Live on Paper
Some of the most beautiful bridges we have published never left the drawing. We include them because a good idea for a crossing is still a good idea, even when the funding falls through.
No. 19
The Garden Bridge, London
Thomas Heatherwick’s idea was almost childishly simple: connect the north and south banks of the Thames with a garden. Trees, paths, benches, a place to linger over the water. It spent years working through approvals and had already consumed tens of millions of pounds before London balked at the £200 million price tag for a bridge that carried no cars.
We were sad to see it go, and we still are. It would have been a green rebuke to a skyline that was busy filling up with glass. The rendering above is as close as it got.
No. 20
The Bridge of Togetherness, St James’s Park, London
Heatherwick again, this time with a proposal for the national memorial to Queen Elizabeth II: a footbridge across the lake in St James’s Park, sheltered beneath eight enormous sculptural lilies that glow at night. It was our favorite of the five shortlisted designs when we covered the competition in 2025. The commission ultimately went to Foster + Partners, whose winning scheme has a bridge of its own, a translucent span inspired by one of the Queen’s tiaras. The lilies stayed with us anyway.
It belongs to a small family of bridges we have covered that exist only as drawings, including Carlo Ratti’s clean, cable-stayed proposal to replace Baltimore’s fallen Key Bridge. Whether or not they get built, they change what we expect a crossing to look like.
A Last Look Back
Why We Keep Coming Back to Bridges
Buildings are for the people inside them. Bridges are for everyone. They are the one kind of monumental architecture that the public gets to use for free, every day, without a ticket or an invitation, and the best of them repay that generosity by being lovely to look at from a mile away. Seventeen years into publishing this site, we still cannot pass one without slowing down.
If you want to keep going, our guide to the most extraordinary buildings in the world covers the structures on either end of these crossings, and the Architecture hub is where every new bridge we cover will land first. For the vocabulary, from cable-stayed to cantilever, there is the Glossary of Visual Culture & Design.
And if you would like the next great bridge delivered to your inbox rather than hunted down, Fog Signals, our weekly newsletter, is where we share the things we find first.
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