RIBA bridge design competitions - any better?

Last August, I asked the question: do RIBA bridge design competitions work? At the time, my conclusion was that they offered a mixed bag: out of six competitions I considered, two ended going nowhere; one appeared to be going well; and three were impossible to tell. None of them had actually resulted in a bridge being built, which you might have thought was the aim of the promoters in each case.

One reason for asking the question was that at the time, RIBA-run bridge competitions were proving controversial in the engineering press. This was largely because of RIBA's insistence that entrants to their competitions must include an architect on the team, a ridiculous requirement in the bridge design field (to be clear: architects can help design great bridges; they're just not essential). However, behind the scenes, there was greater discontent, with a number of prominent designers concerned that RIBA (and other) design competitions were producing designs that were structurally bonkers, and expensive to both build and maintain.

Since then, RIBA has agreed with the ICE and IStructE to allow engineers to enter such competitions without an architect (the recent architects-only ideas contest for an inhabited London Bridge notwithstanding), and to include knowledgeable bridge engineers on all bridge design competition juries. So, the question is, have things improved?

I'll cover the same six schemes as last time, to see how they've moved on, plus the one other RIBA bridge competition held since then.

River Wear Crossing

An invitation-only competition was held in 2005, with the winner announced in September of that year as Techniker and Spence Associates (pictured right). Last August, there were moves to secure government funding, but the bridge design itself hadn't been made public. Things moved on rapidly, though. Wraps were taken off the design in September, it was subject to public consultation, and then confirmed as the preferred option, subject to further feasibility study and cost review. Sunderland Council has never made public the losing entries, but I showed two of them here in March.

Since the end of 2008, things have gone quiet, although I understand preparatory work on the Sunderland Strategic Transport Corridor, the grandly named road scheme that the bridge forms part of, is continuing. However, as it stands, Sunderland Council's support for the Techniker design is subject to further assessment of its affordability, and central government have not yet given unconditional agreement to fund the scheme. My own view is that the present cost estimates for the iconic bridge are too low (given its profoundly unusual structural behaviour) and that it will never be built.

Is that the fault of the RIBA competition process?

I think so. The design was chosen on aesthetic merit before it was subject to a technical review by engineers with appropriate expertise, and has been allowed to gather public support before any serious attempt to review its cost or feasibility has been completed. The risks inherent in the design should have been challenged robustly before a winner was chosen.

River Avon Footbridge

No change here: the competition winner (pictured left) was announced in January 2007, and the scheme cancelled in July 2008 due to rising costs. It won't be resurrected. I've covered the losing entries for this one as well.

I don't think the competition process is especially to blame - the winning design (by Schlaich Bergermann and Ian Ritchie) is attractive and the engineering risks should have been low. Lack of strong local commitment to the scheme seems to have been the main problem, although I have to say the increased scheme costs are a puzzle - they don't seem to be merited by such a simple bridge.

Leeds-Liverpool Canal Footbridge

This one was looking good last time around. The competition for a bridge in Bootle was won in February 2007 by Eckersley O'Callaghan and Softroom (pictured right), who went on to secure planning permission by May 2008, despite a near doubling of the project budget. An August 2008 start date was reported, but as far as I can find out, construction has still not started. Competition entries here.

The cost rise here seems largely attributable to the low initial budget of £400k, which is very low for a landmark structure, however short the span. It's not clear at all why this scheme has stopped. I think the competition organisers must take some of the blame - if funding is the issue, as seems most likely, they should be telling promoters upfront when their budgets and aspirations don't match. There's also a need to discourage competitions from being run when funding isn't secure, as the cost to unsuccessful competitors is an unfair burden - people compete in the expectation that the winning bridge will be built. Where that's not the case, prize money should be greater to reflect the greater fee risk.

New Islington Footbridge

Last year, it was too early to tell if this Manchester footbridge would go ahead. A winner, by Michael Hadi Associates and Gollifer Langston (pictured left) had been announced in July 2007. Since then, it became apparent that funding was no longer available to build the winning design (if it ever was). The local regeneration company has had staff budgets slashed, which means they will have little money for the bridge. However, the very latest news is that the design has been submitted for planning consent, and that efforts to secure funding are still ongoing.

As for RIBA's role, I think it's the same as at Bootle - the competition simply shouldn't have gone ahead if there was a high risk that entrants would go unrewarded. Competition entries here.

Sheffield Parkway Footbridge

In January 2008, Norlund Architects and Ramboll Whitbybird won this footbridge contest. Since then, there's been complete silence, although on the Norlund Architects website it says the bridge is due to be built in 2010. I don't really believe that, but let's be kind, give it the benefit of the doubt, and assume this bridge is still undergoing design development. Competition entries here.

River Douglas Footbridge

The proposal to span the River Douglas, near Preston, was always on the optimistic side. It was clear even at the time of the competition that there was no funding in place to actually build the bridge, and that the organisers intended to use the winning design (by Arup and JDA Architects, pictured left) to try and drum up some cash. Quite how many entrants actually realised that is a different matter, as the contest had a ridiculous 110 submissions.

So far as I can tell, the project has yet to secure funding, and once again designers have been very poorly rewarded for a scheme which seems to be going nowhere. I've previously discussed both the shortlisted designs, and shown some of the other unsuccessful entries.

River Soar Footbridge

Here's a case where it really is too soon to judge - the winner (Buro Happold with Explorations Architecture, pictured right) was only announced at the end of February. Other entries here. I don't know whether design is progressing yet, and it would be rather unfair to speculate how well it will go just yet. Compared to other recent RIBA competitions, this one seems to have been run well, with only six firms invited to submit entries, and each of them paid £6,000, which will cover a reasonable proportion of their costs.

So, what are the scores on the doors? I make it: one bridge cancelled for definite (Stratford); three stranded without funds (Bootle, New Islington, River Douglas); one still trying to prove its feasibility (River Wear); and two don't knows / too early to tell (Sheffield, River Soar).

Looked at another way, only three out of the seven have made it as far as planning consent stage (Bootle, New Islington, Stratford). None have made it as far as putting a spade in the ground. By those measures, the RIBA design competition seems a pretty good way to get lots of publicity, but not a great way to actually get a bridge built. To be fair to RIBA, past competitions prior to these seven have not always been so unlucky - they have led to bridges being built (e.g. the Infinity Bridge, although in that case only at a cost three times what was allowed for in the competition). It's also important to understand that the process of getting any bridge built can be subject to lengthy hiatuses and false starts, so some of these bridges may yet get there in the end.

The cost to the bridge design sector of these seven competitions is substantial, and certainly well in excess of £1m. The customers don't seem to worry about that: if you could get dozens of concept designs and still pay peanuts, why wouldn't you? However, the cost to the taxpayer will also be considerable, particularly on schemes like River Wear and Stratford where substantial investment has been made in the designs.

The real question is whether there's a better way to procure a landmark bridge design. Bridges at Stirling, Brisbane and Glasgow have recently been built through the Design-and-Build route, with no evident loss of design quality, and although a risky design was chosen, the Rhyl opening footbridge may well prove to be similarly successful. Other fine bridges have resulted from the promoter going it alone and organising their own competition.

Keys to success? A clear political will, with public support. Funding in place. Inviting a small number of designers and rewarding them sufficiently to spend time optioneering rather than just being obliged to draw up their first idea in order to meet the contest's deadline. Giving engineers a strong role (design-and-build normally forces this to happen, because no sensible contractor will put forward a design they aren't confident they can build for a known sum of money).

There's no reason why all of these can't be in place for a RIBA competition, but the evidence suggests that when any one of them isn't there, the scheme will fail.

Update 15 July 2009: I'm told by Prospect Leicestershire that the next stage of design of River Soar Footbridge is about to start, progressing towards a planning application.

Bridge competition debris part 5: Stratford-upon-Avon

Late last year I briefly discussed with a fellow bridge designer how difficult it can be to trace the history of design competitions. The advent of Google makes it tempting to think that all knowledge is at your fingertips, but of course this isn't the case at all. Websites disappear (competition websites are often taken down after the project fails and the promoter loses interest), and much of the rich history of the bridge design competition predates widespread use of the internet anyway.

Some help is at hand: sites like europaconcorsi and e-architect take an interest in archiving designs that were never built, and can be a useful if incomplete resource.

In 2008, I offered a set of four posts of "bridge competition debris": the winners and losers from New Islington, Bootle, Sheffield Parkway and River Douglas, with the aim of bringing together images that otherwise are hard to find and may eventually be inaccessible. I thought that would be that, but now think there is scope to continue further.

So the next in this continuing series is the 2006 Stratford-upon-Avon footbridge competition, run (like all those above) by RIBA. There were over 60 expressions of interest, with 5 competitors shortlisted. After the winner had spent some time developing their design (and the client had spent over £300k), the project was cancelled in July 2008 as costs had risen more than 50% above the promoter's original £2m budget.

The Warwickshire County Council website currently features plenty of detail on the competition, including consultation documents, reports, and a copy of the winning design's presentation board.

So what about the designs themselves? The client shortlisted a good set of teams, although it's very unfortunate that they missed the opportunity to let new talent have a go.

The winner was a good choice - minimal, unintrusive in the setting, and a good opportunity on a small-span footbridge to push the limits of design somewhat. It's a shame that costs derailed it. The Wilkinson Eyre design has very obvious similarities to their Floral Street bridge [PDF]. I think at this scale it looks over-fussy and over-deep. In a similar manner, the Flint and Neill design has echoes of their cranked stress-ribbon Kent Messenger bridge. Whitbybird's scheme seems very much out of scale with the site to my eyes.

As always, click on any image for a full-size version. Please note that while there are definite references on the web linking two of the designers to their images, I can't find definitive links for the other three, and have guessed the designers' identities based on what I know of them.

Winner

Schlaich Bergermann & Partners / Ian Ritchie Architects


Shortlisted

Arup / Wilkinson Eyre


Buro Happold / Spence Associates


Flint & Neill / Dissing + Weitling


Whitbybird


Others

In asking for expressions of interest, RIBA were looking for details of potential competitors' past experience, not actual bridge designs. But judging from the example below, they must have received at least one ...

Public House / Webb Yates [PDF]

Do RIBA bridge competitions work?

There have been a few interesting reports recently on RIBA bridge competitions, whether their rules are fair, and whether the winning bridges are too expensive or never get built.

I thought it might be interesting to review some of their competitions and see whether taken as a whole, they can be seen as a successful path to bridge procurement or not. Their website only holds results from 2005 onwards, so I've limited myself to those - I'm ignoring earlier RIBA-run bridge competitions including the London Millennium Bridge and Butterfly Bridge in Bedford.

Where I can find the information, I've included some key facts, such as the number of entrants, and the cost of the bridge per square metre of deck (a non-iconic footbridge can be built for as little as £1,000 per square metre, and £4,000 - £6,000 should be sufficient for many landmark bridges).

River Wear Crossing

Invitation only, 35 expressions of interest reduced to 6 shortlisted entrants. Winner announced in September 2005 as Techniker with Spence Associates. Budget £43 million. As of today, the winning entry has never been publicly revealed. However, it appears that proposals to build a bridge are moving ahead, with attempts to secure government funding and the more recent announcement that government funding has been secured, albeit for a "bog-standard" bridge. Cost per square metre of deck would have been about £4,000 based on the original budget.

River Avon Footbridge

Invitation only, with 5 shortlisted entrants. Winner announced in January 2007 as Schlaich Bergermann with Ian Ritchie Architects. Budget £2 million. Cancelled in July 2008 when budget reached £3.3 million, having spent £312,000 to get to planning application stage. Cost per square metre of deck would have been about £17,500.

Leeds-Liverpool Canal Footbridge

Open competition, with 88 entrants. Winner announced in February 2007 as Eckersley O'Callaghan with Softroom. Budget £400k. By May 2008, the budget was then stated as £700k, but planning permission had been secured. An August 2008 start on site was forecast. Cost per square metre of deck is £7,000 (based on planning drawings available at http://www.sefton.gov.uk/Default.aspx?page=5297 - search for "Pennington Road").

New Islington Footbridge

Open competition, with 87 entrants. Winner announced in July 2007 as Michael Hadi Associates with Gollifer Langston. Again, I seem to recall an original budget of about £350k. I've been unable to find any evidence of progress since the winner was declared. Does anyone know otherwise?

Sheffield Parkway Footbridge

Open competition, with "over 100" entrants. Winner announced in January 2008 as Ramboll Whitbybird with Tim Norlund. Budget was quoted as £1.5m in the original brief, but has been stated as £2m elsewhere. For the span of 37m and width of 4m stated in the brief, the £1.5m budget gives a cost per square metre of deck of £10,100, but the proposed design looks to be longer than that, so the real figure is probably much lower! Again, I can find no evidence of further progress, but it's still early days for this one.

River Douglas Footbridge

Open competition with 110 entrants, reduced to shortlist of 7. Winner set to be announced later this year. Budget is stated as £2-3 million in the brief, for a bridge about 85m long and 4m wide. That's about £5,880 - £8,820 per square metre of deck.

Conclusions

So, for the last 4 years, we can report 2 competitions that ended by going nowhere (Wear, Avon); 1 that seems to be going well (Liverpool); and 3 where it's too early yet to say (New Islington, Sheffield, River Douglas). Considering the amount of money spent by various parties (particularly for the open competitions, where the combined cost to the economy of all the entrants' time could easily exceed £0.25m per competition), that might not seem to be very good value.

This isn't necessarily a poke at RIBA and their competition office. For the two obvious failures, the key themes seem to be a lack of proper funding, feasibility study, and commitment from the promoters. But any cost-benefit analysis of these competitions would show a considerable loss to the wider economy in wasted professional time, both by unsuccessful entrants, and at Stratford, by the successful ones. The need for proper preparation by a client before running such a competition seems very clear.

RIBA bridge competition ends in nothing

The project to build a new footbridge in Stratford-upon-Avon has come to an unhappy end, and one not entirely untypical of bridge competitions. It has been cancelled due to "spiralling costs".

In 2006, RIBA ran a bridge design competition for a new footbridge over the River Avon in Stratford, garnering over 60 entries. Five entries were shortlisted in November 2006, and the winner announced as Schlaich Bergermann & Partners with Ian Ritchie Architects, with a super-slender steel arch design (pictured). This was an interesting reaction against a trend towards structurally gymnastic cable-supported bridges which had dominated high-profile footbridge design.

The promoting authorities' support for the bridge always seemed to be in doubt. It was promoted by Warwickshire County Council, but there was considerably opposition in the local press to what was seen as an unnecessary scheme, and the council's lukewarm attitude was reflected in consultation after consultation, with associated feasibility reports and pedestrian studies. Most of these were prepared after the competition had already begun, suggesting that a genuine need for the bridge was never conclusively demonstrated.

The original scheme budget was £2m, which is ample for a bridge that is 50m long, and is 3.71m wide. That works out at over £10,000 per square metre of deck, which is plenty for almost any footbridge, however unusual (for dimensions, see the original design submission at Warwickshire's website).

Now, however, Warwickshire have spent £312,000 on getting the bridge to planning submission stage, and have in the process re-estimated the bridge's budget cost at £3.3m, an increase of over 50% and equating to over £17,500 per square metre. Not unsurprisingly, the project has been cancelled, with the council quoted as saying "neither the County or District Councils are in a position to fund the shortfall so we have reluctantly decided to remove the bridge from the World Class Stratford programme." Given that Warwickshire were only going to stump up £0.2m of the original budget (the rest coming from external development funding), it's easy to understand their decision.

So what really went wrong?

The council's original budget certainly wasn't at fault, for what should have been a fairly straightforward and simple river footbridge. There are several competitions where the budgets are unrealistically low, certainly in comparison to the effort expected from entrants. The need for repeated studies and consultations, as well as the low budget contribution from the main stakeholder suggest a lack of commitment which won't have helped. Surely a proper feasibility study prior to holding an expensive competition would have helped establish a firmer case for the bridge (or led to its cancellation prior to spending so much money)?

The council has chosen to blame construction price inflation, particularly steel prices, but any sound project should assess risks such as this at the outset and take them into account throughout. Steel price inflation wasn't an unknown when the winner was chosen in late 2006.

Was there something particularly risky about this design that the council could have spotted and dealt with? The "glasgowbridge" competition was one high profile case where the winning design came in well above budget (like Stratford, subsequently cancelled), and where it was apparent that the design was structurally challenging, to say the least. Was that the case here?

The Stratford design was an arch that was both very slender (50m span and only 350mm thick at midspan, a span-depth ratio of 142), and with a very shallow rise. The former will have made it susceptible to dynamic excitation, and the latter will have created an unusually large horizontal thrust on the abutments, but it's hard not to think that these could both be addressed within the original budget.

The council also cites "additional flood mitigation measures" as increasing the cost, and it may be the case that there are issues beyond the bridge itself affecting the scheme.

I'd ask whether a RIBA competition was the right approach to such a minor structure. The Stratford bridge isn't the only RIBA competition to go nowhere due to uncertain funding and commitment from the promoter - another happened at River Wear in Sunderland.

One lesson perhaps is that ambitions should be scaled to match the resources really available (including the willingness to deal with risks); another could be that the conventional non-competition design process (feasibility study, preliminary design, detailed design etc) may uncover problems at an earlier and more cost-effective stage.