If Dick Tracy Had Been There

The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas, Texas, just before sunset and the city's night lights. This is a favorite time of day for us, golden hour has mostly passed, but we're not yet saturated with blue hour. And in this venue, the city's brilliant architectural lighting, including the bridge lights, have not yet appeared. The lighting here is all natural, stylized for a light nod to the golden era of comic books when the men wore zoot suits, the cars had suicide doors, and everything glowed. You were alive, and you knew it!

The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge catches golden hour light on its 400-foot arch in a way that Santiago Calatrava clearly anticipated — the structure was designed to be looked at, and the evening light confirms the arrangement. Opened in 2012, the bridge carries the West Dallas neighborhood across the Trinity River Corridor on a single cable-stayed arch that is both engineering and sculpture in the Calatrava tradition. The warm tone of the arch cables and the cooler blue of the sky behind hold their full contrast in the available golden light — a color relationship that lasts perhaps twenty minutes before the sky darkens past it. The image works in the long minutes before the city lights overtake the natural light entirely.