The art of major bridge-building - Hellmut Homberg and his contribution to multiple cable-stayed spans

Based on findings from Büchenauer Bridge (1956), the North Elbe Bridge in Hamburg (1963) and the bridge over the Rhine at Leverkusen (1965), Homberg designed and engineered the Friedrich Ebert Bridge across the River Rhine. This was the first bridge in the world with cables that distribute instead of concentrate the load transfer, and thus define the bridge deck as a continuous, elastically supported element and not as a beam on point supports.
After the building of major bridges declined in Germany, Homberg became active in France, and later rounded off his work with multi-cable-stayed bridges in the UK. That work resulted in the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge (1991), Homberg’s late magnum opus.
This article contains a complete catalogue of Homberg’s multi-cable-stayed bridges and discusses for the first time previously unpublished designs by Homberg. These prove that he had already moved on from the classic cable-stayed bridge to the general multi-span cable-stayed bridge as early as 1963.