25 January 2010

Bridges news roundup

Deal would let light-rail trains use I-90 express lanes
The significance for bridge engineers is the proposal to put a railway on a jointed floating bridge - has this been done anywhere else? Design of the rail joints will be challenging, I'd think!

Perryn Road footbridge over the A40, London by Grimshaw
There was an engineer too (Hyder), but let's not expect the Architects Journal to bother with trivia, even on a scheme were they report the key design challenge as being dealing with buried utilities.

Bednarski Origami bridge to move forward as part of Cardiff TV centre scheme
I had wondered what had happened to this bridge.

Softroom’s Bootle bridge hoisted into place
RIBA contest winning footbridge approaches completion.
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4 comments:

Sketch Country said...

Does anyone have information on the 'mechanical lamination' for the Bootle Bridge?

It sounds like complex tongue and groove!

January 26, 2010 at 2:10 PM
The Happy Pontist said...

It may be stress-laminated timber (for which Google will yield a number of examples), where the timber lamina are stressed together by rods or ties, and friction between the lamina eliminates the need for glue. However, you would normally expect to be able to see the tie-heads in stress-laminated timber.

The structural engineer's website says the timber is glulam, but perhaps that was at an earlier stage of design development.

January 26, 2010 at 3:22 PM
Anonymous said...

Ref. the AJ article on the Perryn Road Footbridge, the first line of the article starts "Designed with Hyder Consulting...", so I think you are being needlessly unfair about credits. With the exception of Lord Foster, who seems to be immune, NCE (in particular) and other engineering journals constantly fail to note the involvement of architects in bridge design. However engineers, architects and journos alike seem to constantly focus on the object and not on the positioning of the bridge in the urban realm, how it ties places together and how it will be used. This bright yellow span is a cheery addition to a drab road, but the ramps are what the bridge users will mostly experience and they are very ugly and intimidating. How many people would rather take their chances with the traffic...?

January 27, 2010 at 3:25 PM
The Happy Pontist said...

You are right, I was being unreasonably shirty, but interviewing the architect about the buried services still seems somewhat puzzling ... somewhat moot now as the article seems to have vanished from being freely available into the AJ's subscribers-only zone ...

January 27, 2010 at 11:46 PM

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