Driving on the freeway overpasses can offer an amazing view. For me its a panorama of the San Francisco skyline stretching north across to the East Bay Oakland Hills. I was high above the ground driving on the top tier of the Mac Arthur Maze.
The MacArthur Maze is a major arterial exchange feeding and fed by the Oakland Bay Bridge. Few other densely-populated places portray the engineering challenges of routing massive amounts of traffic to and from a single access point.
The structure of ‘The Maze’ streamlined travel by raising the exchange above a complex intersection of railroad tracks and light industrial factories resulting in three levels of crossovers, the highest an incredible 120’ flyover. While driving the highest point I asked myself, “What’s happening below?”
The space below is a network of rail yards, service roads and warehouses; a residue of earlier times with paved over curved rail tracks still hugged by matching curved warehouses. The jostle of rail transit below has largely been replaced by the din of automotive transit above. The world passes over and no longer passes through.
When you look up, however, it’s a different story. The underside of the Macarthur Maze is an extraordinary tangle of sweeping steel spans on massive concrete columns. Because of the complex arrangement of connections, the freeway structures of varying heights and distances. Unlike a standard cloverleaf interchange, the maze executes complicated connections resulting in unique, unrepetitive forms.
The structures aren’t elegant. It’s pure form and function, an engineer’s response to a unique set of demanding constraints with a keen understanding of the simplicity of a material’s properties, designed with durability, serviceability and efficiency in mind. While the objective wasn’t design in an artistic sense the result is a set of powerful, dense forms and patterns with a dynamic strength demanding respect and wonder. Now I know what’s going on under my tires and think a little bit differently when driving up there on my observation deck in the sky.
Freewaze is a collection of photographs of the underside of the MacArthur Maze freeway taken on two separate visits.