Poking out of a jumble of drab apartment buildings, office blocks and hotels, a soaring suspension bridge designed by an internationally celebrated architect is reshaping the main entrance to Jerusalem, generating debate about modern urban aesthetics in a city of timeless shrines.

The harp-like bridge, known as The Bridge of Strings, was designed by Spanish-born architect Santiago Calatrava to carry a light-rail train that will be part of a new mass transit system in Jerusalem. On Wednesday, the span is to be officially dedicated with a fireworks and light show extravaganza.

Yet the bridge, with its 387-foot tilted mast and 66 cables, has not been uniformly welcomed in the city, where architectural change often confronts the weight of history and forces of habit that run deep.

"This is out of proportion, grandiose and has gone too far," said Yoni Tzabari, 30, as he gazed at the steel and cable complex outside his window. "We're not in New York."

Tzabari's apartment overlooks the busy intersection where the bridge will carry the light-rail train above the flow of traffic, sweeping in an arc through a 90-degree turn.

Unique challenge

Calatrava, who has designed bridges and notable buildings around the world —among them the twisting Chicago Spire under construction — said in a telephone interview that planning the Jerusalem bridge was a unique engineering challenge.

A highway tunnel beneath the intersection at the city entrance precluded building bridge supports there, so the span had to be held by cables suspended from the mast, while accommodating the sharp turn of the train route, he said.

The contemporary bridge design also had to accommodate the traditional urban landscape of Jerusalem, where all buildings are faced with local limestone under an ordinance dating to 1918, during the British Mandate in Palestine. So ramps leading to the steel and glass bridge are being clad in stone, and a pedestrian plaza planned underneath will feature stone benches and stone-faced light fixtures.

"The bridge covers the gap between tradition and modernity," Calatrava said. "It marries the two things."

Some critics say the bridge, six years in the making at a cost of over $70 million, is lost in the clutter of buildings where the highway from Tel Aviv nears Jerusalem. After a climb through pine-covered hills to the city, the bridge is revealed to motorists only when they are nearly under it.

"The effect of the bridge is weakened because of its chaotic location," said Hillel Schocken, who heads Tel Aviv University's school of architecture.

But Calatrava says the bridge is visible from other locations, and besides, it is not meant to be seen entire but discovered gradually, from different perspectives.

"You can't capture it in one look of the eye, like the Golden Gate Bridge. It has a certain mystery, like something that doesn't want to present itself to you at once," he said.

Secular symbol

Municipal officials are touting the bridge as the newest landmark of a city already brimming with historic and religious sites.

Amir Kolker, an architect whose firm co-designed Jerusalem's city hall complex and the Israeli Foreign Ministry building, said that Calatrava's bridge serves as an important secular symbol in a city freighted with religious and political tension.

"In a city that is so charged like Jerusalem, there is great value in turning a technical installation into a cultural symbol that has no social or religious baggage, and enables many people to identify with it," Kolker said.

Yet the bridge is in the Jewish part of Jerusalem, and the debate swirling around it is preoccupying mainly Israelis, not Palestinians living in the city.

Entrances to the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem from the West Bank are monitored by Israeli checkpoints flanked by a separation barrier, and the architectural future of those areas awaits a political deal on the future of the city. Palestinians seek East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel after the 1967 Middle East war, as the capital of a future state.

David Kroyanker, an architectural historian of Jerusalem, said that although the cable bridge is being promoted as reminiscent of the harp of the biblical King David, it is one local landmark that "has no holiness."

The graceful bridge represents "something more normal, more cosmopolitan, lighter" than Jerusalem's traditional landmarks.

Yet the Calatrava bridge, in itself, will not draw people to the city, Kroyanker said.

"Tourists won't come to Jerusalem because of the bridge," he said. "The city has its own sacredness and magic. Jerusalem doesn't need another symbol. It needs quiet."