Empirical aesthetics of bridges
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bridges are works of public infrastructure designed to perform a practical function. They are unique among works of engineering in that they also have a significant aesthetic dimension. At their best, they inspire awe and wonder. At their worst, they are eyesores. Little is known about what shapes the aesthetic appeal of bridges. Here we explore how visible features originating primarily from practical considerations relate to aesthetic judgements of bridges. Our dataset comprises of images of 318 bridges from around the world, rated by 254 participants for aesthetic pleasure, interest, complexity, and safety. Civil engineers annotated each bridge's type, depth, visible material, age, and aesthetic premium. Using Factorial Analysis of Mixed Data, we found two significant dimensions. The first dimension, "aesthetics", shows strong correlations among aesthetic, complexity, and interest ratings and is related to bridge type. The second dimension, "perceived safety", relates subjective ratings of safety to bridge age and material. Analyses of visual features, using the Mid-Level Vision Toolbox, shows that contour length and angularity are predictors of the "aesthetics" dimension. For example, cable-stayed bridges are represented by many short and angular contours and are generally rated as more complex, interesting, and aesthetically pleasing. Conversely, slab bridges are often represented by a few long contours and are rated as uninteresting and not aesthetically pleasing. Our study offers the first systematic attempt to collect and analyze subjective ratings of bridge aesthetics, paving the way for empirically supported decisions for the design of bridges and, potentially, other works of public infrastructure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".