People have remarked on how natural the kind of bridges I build look. I guess there is a simplicity of both form and function to their design. A bridge made by hand, without machinery or power tools, will usually look more appealing than one where the material has been bullied and beaten into submission.
I am dedicated to the idea that bridges don't have to look pretentious either. This means making them as efficiently and honestly as possible. I imagine many footbridges back in the old country were built this same way.
The skill of a mason is not determined just by their stone-shaping ability or how perfect their work is merely as a result of having chosen only the best material. It is based on an ability to work with stones that a less skilled waller might try to avoid. It means being competent enough to know when and where a challengingly irregular 'unshaped' (or 'unshapable' ?) stone could be used to 'do the job', just the way it comes out of the quarry, or collected from off the field.
A bridge built with restraint (in terms of not overworking the material) is less likely to look annoyingly new and out of place, especially if all the faces of the stones don't all have fresh breaks and chisel marks on them.
While it is important to fit every stone properly, bridge building is not about impressing people with your stone shaping skills. A bridge can be charmingly beautiful without seeming 'showy' or glaringly new-looking.
Have you ever seen something new that looks so 'right' that it feels like it has always been there? It takes a lot of invisible effort to make something appear effortless. I know I have done my best when I can create a bridge where the maximum structural integrity has been achieved with the minimum of fussing and bothering about 'shaping' ( fixing ? conquering ? spotlighting? ) every single stone I touched.
