Pont de Neuilly

The Pont de Neuilly stretches across the Seine as a wide, flat concrete deck, carrying a major highway directly toward the business district of La Défense. Jean-Rodolphe Perronet designed the original stone bridge here in the seventeen seventies with five massive arches. During its construction, the scaffolding collapsed three times, and critics predicted the flat arches would crumble under their own weight. Instead, the bridge remained stable for nearly two hundred years until engineers replaced it to handle modern traffic.