You’ve never seen a bridge like the Sundial, this glass-and-steel sculpture that now soars over the Sacramento River.

By Ron Fimrite

Y ou can say this about the city leaders of Redding, Calif.: When it comes to building a footbridge, they're not afraid to get their feet wet. In fact, they hired one of the world's foremost bridge designers, Santiago Calatrava, an architect of an aesthetic sensibility so refined he has been described by Time as "the poet of glass and steel."

The product of this unusual collaboration, when it is unveiled with an appropriate celebration of fireworks on July 4, will be a $23 million, 700-foot-long, 23-foot-wide work of art, the likes of which has never been seen spanning the generally unadorned northern reaches of the Sacramento River.