The Office for Monument Preservation of the Rhineland Regional Council (LVR) applied for Oberkasseler and Rheinkniebrücke to be included in the list of monuments. Together with the Theodor-Heuss-Bridge, all three remaining bridges in Düsseldorf would be under monument protection as the “Düsseldorf bridge family”.
The inclusion of the Oberkasseler and the Rheinkniebrücke in the list of monuments of the Düsseldorf district government follows a two-step process. The evaluation of a monument must be done according to purely technical criteria. Conservation issues are dealt with on this basis in the second step.
Dr. Ralf Liptau, scientific consultant for technical monuments at the LVR-ADR. The Theodor Heuss Bridge was first built in the 1950s. The Rheinknie Bridge followed in the late 1960s, and ten years later the new Oberkasseler Bridge was built. Friedrich Tamms, the city planning officer of Düsseldorf at the time, arranged for the very modern bridges to be built in close structural and aesthetic dependence. Even then, there was talk of the “Düsseldorf bridge family”. However, different urban planning conditions, the flow conditions of the Rhine and technical innovations lead to variations in detail. “In Düsseldorf, they created a kind of sample collection for bridges with a more modern design, which did not exist before in this size,” says Liptau. “Internationally noted, the Düsseldorf bridges were exemplary for even the largest bridge construction project worldwide.”
In addition to the technical-historical importance of the bridge, the Office of Monument Conservation sees other reasons for an entry in the list of monuments. Friedrich Tamms involved renowned engineers such as Fritz Leonhardt in the project, whom he knew from working for the Reichsautobahn during the National Socialist era. The planning of the bridge meant the continuity of the Nazi career in the young Federal Republic. In their entirety, the bridges also witness the extensive conversion of Düsseldorf into a car-friendly administrative metropolis in the decades after World War II.
The family of bridges with their stay cables and pylons that are more than 100 meters high have had a formative effect on the city until today.