Here is a Swiss railway poster from the 1950s…The poster combines several of my interests: posters, railways and modernist engineering and architecture.
The poster shows an elegant and beautiful concrete bridge in the style of the pioneer concrete engineer, Robert Maillart. I looked, and this bridge is the Mundbach bridge. It’s not listed as by Maillart. The road original bridge is stone, with a second bridge in concrete alongside. The Swiss railway infrastructure is documented, online, with impressive accuracy. The poster, on the other hand, is an idealised representation.
The background landscape seems very different from that shown in the poster, perhaps appealing to train passengers with a taste for a more gentle landscape…
If you are interested in the history of concrete, as a building material with under-realised sculptural potential, there is a documentary film: Maillart’s Bridges (2000). Maillart was a genius at working out how to achieve structural integrity with the least and most elegant use of concrete – see, it doesn’t have to be brutal.