The men who built Sheikh Zayed Bridge

As construction of the bridge reaches its final stage, Roy Lengweiler's candid photographs pay tribute to the men who made it possible.

Rene Padirayon on top of the main arch in autumn 2009. Courtesy Roy Lengweiler

One of Abu Dhabi's longest running construction projects, the building of the Sheikh Zayed Bridge, is moving towards its closing scene, onwards to the time when the deafening sound of building work and the rattle of dismantled scaffolding will be replaced by the rumble of commuter traffic rolling across its long, straight expanse.
Load testing began earlier this week. This is the seemingly old-fashioned practice of placing heavy objects on the deck - in this case, fully-loaded lorries - and checking that the structure bends the way it is meant to.
How long the bridge will be in this final phase is still the subject of conflicting reports. Earlier this month, The National reported that drivers may be able to use the bridge within days, but suggested that its opening could coincide with the UAE's birthday on December 2. The Abu Dhabi Municipality has said only that it will open "per schedule", in the last quarter of this year. Even at this late stage, the fanciful, futuristic structure remains tantalising.
Perhaps that is appropriate for so elusive a design. Its form seems to mimic both dunes and crashing waves (officially the project is inspired by the patterns of desert sand). It was conceived by Zaha Hadid, a visionary architect operating at the limits of her creativity. And yet, despite the weightless grace of the structure, its statistics are overwhelming in their magnitude.
The bridge is asymmetrical and fully 842 metres in length (compared to, say, the 503 metres of Sydney Harbour Bridge). It rises to a height of 64 metres with a road deck 61 metres wide. It was seven, close to eight years in the making. The project required 250,000 cubic metres of concrete to be poured and rendered above and below ground. Steel arches weighing close to 12,000 tonnes buttress the structure. Up to 2,500 men, recruited from close to 50 different nations, were on the site at any time.
A further avalanche of figures will inevitably engulf coverage of the bridge when it opens. The human story of its construction will recede from memory and the bridge will stand alone, seemingly self-created, or a monument to Hadid's ingenuity. Yet the work of one man - perhaps one should say his hobby - promises to save that narrative from oblivion.
*****
Roy Lengweiler is a project manager for Archirodon Construction, the Greek-owned company that has been largely responsible for building the Sheikh Zayed Bridge. I say largely because earlier this year Six Construct, a Belgian company, took control of the site.
A Swiss expatriate, Lengweiler is also a career bridge-builder. His 25 years in the field have taken him through northern Europe, Asia and onwards to Saudi Arabia, where he was on the team that built the Wadi Leban Bridge in Riyadh. He arrived in Abu Dhabi in January 2003, where he was among the first dozen people at the site. He will be there in the final hours, too.
"In the early days we just had the drawings in front of us," he told me during one of a series of meetings we had on and off the bridge site. "That is always a special feeling, when you start something from nothing. But the first years were very dry, because the foundations were so massive - we had to drive piles, create cofferdams [airtight enclosures to allow concrete to set below the waterline]."
During our conversations Lengweiler fell easily and instinctively into the matter-of-fact language of an engineer. Yet even he could be driven to figurative flights by certain topics. A few years into the construction it became apparent that Lengweiler and his team were working on what may be the world's most technically baffling bridge, the demands of which seemed to approach the threshold of possibility. "It took us three years to get out of the ground," he said. "Then, when the piers were complete, that was when we really met Zaha Hadid."
Here the story takes an interesting turn.
From the start of the project Lengweiler would pack a camera in his workbag. Nothing fancy, just a compact Canon G10, or very occasionally a 30-year-old Olympus OM2 SLR. He brought them along for purely practical reasons, at first, anyway.
"You always have to take pictures on a build such as this," he told me. "Of problems, of difficulties - they are usually used as details to discuss in meetings." The rhythm of construction, he explained, regularly includes moments when things get stuck or fail to work as planned. Such difficulties require documentation in an environment that is not at all conducive to lugging around bulky camera equipment.
Despite the modesty of his means, Lengweiler is not without creative talent. "When I was a teenager I wanted to become a photographer and I had some success in competition," he said. "I won one prize and from there on I developed my style. Then I was advised to try engineering by my father - which I did. But I never gave up on photography."
Now, after more than 2,000 days spent working on site in Abu Dhabi, his hobby and his job have met in the middle. Lengweiler's work gave him a reason to document the course of the bridge's construction, while the daily return to a familiar site helped hone his art. Somewhere between the two he has assembled a definitive visual account of the men who built a significant piece of Abu Dhabi's history.
"I think these men are real heroes. Do not write too much about me," Lengweiler insisted after I praised his handiwork. He admitted that there had been "tragic accidents" on site, as well as long hours of difficult labour. "I want the people to be the story," he said. "I am an engineer not a photographer."
*****
The pictures show people working in extreme conditions - often at great heights, almost always in the heat of the day - as they strive to turn Hadid's vision into a concrete and steel reality. These images capture men dwarfed by the scale of the parts they stand on. They record the mundane too: mid-morning tea breaks, a late-afternoon smoke, an impromptu game of football at the end of another shift.
Through Lengweiler's framing, the men provide not only a sense of scale, but also of human context. The structure may overwhelm them, but their labours never cease.
In a way the pictures are a latter-day, Abu Dhabi equivalent of Charles Clyde Ebbets' Great Depression-era portraits of New York construction workers. Look closely and you will find Lunchtime atop a Skyscraper reinvented in the Middle East. Indeed, it's difficult to keep sight of the fact that, unlike Ebbets, Lengweiler's pictures are the work of an amateur using a relatively basic camera in brief moments when his day job allowed him to pause and frame a shot.
What, though, does he want others to see in his images? "I would like everyone to appreciate the hard work of these people and to give them the credit they deserve. Once the bridge is finished or, indeed, if you look at it now, it is difficult to comprehend the scale of what has been constructed.
"The false work [scaffolding] has gone now, so you have no idea how the main arch got up there. It was not lifted up there by balloons. There was a lot of effort involved, extraordinary human endeavour," he says.
*****
We met last weekend for one final discussion of the images you see on these pages. Lengweiler was anxious that my words shouldn't portray him as some kind of obsessive artist who deserted his duties as an engineer in pursuit of that shot. He estimates that he has taken around 20,000 photographs, an average of 10 a day since the project began. Still, when I visited the site with him, his casual snapping barely broke the flow of our conversation, which itself took a back seat to his professional duties. He is, after all, an engineer not a photographer.
Nevertheless, he hopes to find a book publisher to print a wider collection of his images, a fuller document of the eight-year construction project. For now at least, he is happiest helping to build bridges, not only because they are physical causeways that join two previously separate points, but also because they help connect people's lives.
What is implicit here too, is that he has achieved some kind of remarkable symmetry between his professional life and his hobby. Roy Lengweiler's photographs span the space between a modern architectural wonder and the men who brought it into being.
Read further coverage of how the bridge was built in The National on Saturday tomorrow.
Nick March is editor of The Review.