British artist Steve Messam has installed a bright red, weight-bearing arch bridge across a stream in the rural Lake District National Park of Cumbria, in UK, using nothing but 22,000 sheets of paper. Messam used no glue and no steel reinforcement. The only thing holding up the bridge is sheer compression. The crazy part is you can actually walk over the bridge without it collapsing.
The bridge may seem surreal, but is actually using the same basic principles of engineering that have been used to build short footbridges for thousands of years. “It relies on vernacular architectural principles as used in the drystone walls and the original pack-horse bridges, which have stood, in many cases, for more than a century," explains Messam.
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