Bridges news roundup

Garden link bridge proposed across the Thames
From Kew to Syon in one easy step

Lake Hodges ribbon bridge opens
It's a ribbon bridge, and it's opening. 'Nuff said.

Calatrava arrives in Dublin
Samuel Beckett bridge arrives from Holland

World's first major tensegrity footbridge nears completion
Decking completed on Brisbane's Kurilpa Bridge. Is this the world's most expensive footbridge? A question for another time, I think!

Bridge over troubled waters
SF Examiner discusses the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge

Bridge competition debris part 13: Liverpool Glass Bridge

In January 2004, at the start of Liverpool's Year of Faith, a competition was launched to design a "glass bridge".

The site was the city's Anglican Cathedral, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's great edifice towering above the edge of St James' Cemetery, a former quarry which had been converted to a burial ground in 1829, and then into a public garden in 1972. In its present form, this artificial canyon acts as a 50-foot deep barrier, preventing access to the Cathedral's south face from nearby Hope Street.

Scott had himself proposed a bridge across the sunken quarry (pictured, right), but this traditionally styled arch viaduct was never started. Construction of the Cathedral had begun in 1904, but it was only formally declared complete in 1978, and the bridge was dropped from the plans as work progressed.

Proposals were again made for a bridge by students at Liverpool University in 1948, and published in the Architectural Review. Their scheme was for a far more modern reinforced concrete arch (pictured, left), but this was somewhat speculative and again, never realised.

The 2004 competition was organised by Dr Robert MacDonald, an architectural lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University. This again was somewhat speculative - there was no funding, and I gather that the Cathedral's support for the proposal was somewhat ambiguous. The hope was that a good idea might attract sufficient funding to become reality, particularly with Liverpool's status as European City of Culture on the horizon in 2008.

The open competition was announced in Building Design magazine, and 23 entries were received. A shortlist was drawn up, and the winner eventually announced in June 2005 as Buro Happold with Hakes Associates. However, the project never did secure funding, and the bridge remains unbuilt.

There are many bridge design competitions which stand on similarly shaky foundations - in recent years, RIBA's River Douglas contest comes to mind as another case where considerable creativity was devoted to a scheme which had no committed funding behind it. Like the RIBA contest, the Liverpool competition attracted a wide variety of entrants, from the seasoned professionals to students, many from people with little understanding of basic structural engineering. Nonetheless, the "glass theme" and the challenging site led to several very interesting designs.

As ever, links are only provided to a competitor if they have a website with more information. Click on the thumbnail images for full-size versions. All images have been provided courtesy of Rob MacDonald but are the copyright of the original competitors. Contestants are invited to get in touch if they want an image removed or can identify the one or two images where I couldn't identify the entrant.

Winner

Buro Happold / Hakes Associates

Shortlisted

Julian Penni


Carl Thompson Associates


WhitbyBird


Ken Martin


DJR Architects

Others

Alison Coleman


"Angel Rising" (designer not known)


Ann Hollingsworth


Architecturem


Studio Bednarski / Jiri Strasky


Ben Batrak


"Bridge of Faith" (designer unknown)


Gang Wu


Dewhurst Macfarlane / Aire Design


Clive Gray


Kieran Hughes


Christian Camcain


Studio BAAD


Simon Hinton


Paul Carr

McChesney Associates / Atelier One

Jamie McShane

"Bridge" by Peter Bishop

"Bridge" (ISBN 978 1 86189 346 8, Reaktion Books, 2008) is one of several books in the Objekt series which takes a cultural studies perspective on key products of modern life. The author, Peter Bishop, graduated in 1967 and worked in civil engineering for five years, but is now an associate professor in communication and cultural studies. As such, he offers a perspective unlikely to be familiar to most bridge enthusiasts or designers. (For more on Bishop, there's a short interview at Who Walk in Brooklyn).

This book is not structured in the way that many books about bridges are – by technology, by history, or by geography. Instead it offers more of a meander through the manner in which bridges are represented, encountered or influential upon society. Although occasional attention is given to the designers of bridges, they are largely absent from Bishop’s perspective, which comes instead from the point of view of those who use or are affected by bridges.

Some indication of how much the book meanders might be gained from knowing that the 55-page introduction is longer than any of the four chapters of the book. Bishop wants to consider the idea of the bridge from as many angles as possible, so in the introduction he offers sections on “the bridge as stage and target”, “psycho-philosophical bridges”, “invisible bridges”, and many other sometimes oblique ways in which the topic could be approached. Central to the book is the concept of bridges as stories rather than objects – as Bishop puts it, “telling the bridge”.

Occasionally, this leads him to consider how people from within the bridge design community tell the bridge story. Writing about David Billington’s seminal book The Tower and the Bridge, Bishop describes Billington’s idea of bridge design as “structural art”, but concentrates on Billington’s somewhat dubious contention that:

“lightness, fragility perhaps – closely parallels the essence of free and open society … [the Menai suspension bridge was] the first major work of structural art visually to symbolize, in its thinness, the lightness of the new engineering and the demands of the new politics”.

These multiple perspectives are aimed at the non-specialist reader, but are a particularly valuable antidote to the narratives which dominate writing on bridge design and bridge history. Most non-technical writing on bridge design concentrates on visual aesthetics, often promoting recipes for supposedly objective ideals about the “beauty” of bridges, flogging the dead horse of function begetting form, or poeticising the shaping of a bridge’s structural elements. A surprisingly small proportion of bridge design literature places the end-user or neighbouring community as central.

In the historical field, writing about bridges is frequently dominated by the history of technology – the story of bridge design told as a sequence of inventions, or by the heroic narrative – the tales of the valiant Great Men who designed bridges (almost never the people who built them, maintained them, or had their homes destroyed to make way for them).

Having set himself against these one-dimensional methodologies, Bishop’s polymorphous, diversely-voiced book generally succeeds in offering something fresh, stories about bridges which haven’t been heard too many times before.

The book’s chapters draw on the introductions wide-ranging ideas but distil these into four basic themes: “technologies of extension”, “technologies of assemblage”, “technologies of connection”, and “spanning technologies”. The last of these falls closest to conventional tales of bridge engineering, identifying key structures from the engineering chronology and discussing the tension between innovation and failure which has driven the quest for ever-longer spans. However, even this section moves beyond this to consider the impact of super-spans such as the proposed Straits of Messina and Hong Kong – Zhuhai – Macau crossings, noting their ability to shift the centres of gravity of existing cities and to enable the creation of new mega-conurbations (the Macau project potentially creating a “city” of nearly 50 million people).

A key focus in earlier chapters is on the bridge as a tool in economic and political expansion, as in the controversial Qinghai-Tibet railway project, incorporating over 600 bridges and helping to cement Chinese political and cultural dominance of Tibet. While opposed by many in the West, this project has clear echoes of the westward expansion of American railroads in the mid-nineteenth century – what is seen by pro-Tibetan westerners as authoritarian in China was seen by most as pioneering and adventurous in America, but the urge to cement control of territory and open up new economic opportunities may be the same in both cases.

A similar example is given in the Hindmarsh Island bridge in Australia, promoted by developers as the vital connection to enable new marina development, but opposed by the aboriginal Ngarrindjeri community due to its purported impact on a sacred fertility site. It was opened in 2001 after a long and bitter legal battle. Like the Tibetan railway, it’s a fascinating account of what is often disguised by bland terms like “stakeholder impact”, but bridges aren’t really central to these accounts, which would be little different whether the projects incorporated bridges or did not.

While this is a weakness, other stories in the book do maintain the focus on the issues specific to bridging. For example, the Skye Bridge is offered as a case where the power of a bridge to connect is not always welcomed by people for whom a sense of disconnection is part of their identity. Another interesting illustration is given in the use of bridges in Israel to facilitate social apartheid by carrying strips of Israeli territory above Palestinian land, a poignant reminder that the ability of a bridge to disrupt shared space and eliminate coexistence (normally, of two types of traffic such as road users and boat users) is not always a happy act.

In general, I thought this was an excellent book, consistently thought-provoking and for the most part free of the impenetrable obfuscation and obsessive quoting of post-structuralist masters (Barthes, Baudrillard et al) that mars much “cultural studies” writing. As a bridge designer, I found it a welcome reminder of the need to think beyond the narrow horizons inherent in a specialist’s interests. It emphasised to me that much of what goes unchallenged by bridge engineers is just the result of our immersion in one of many possible stories about bridges and their creation. This book offers some of those diverse narratives, while making clear that many more remain to be told.

Bridges news roundup

Boris living bridge plan savaged by Grauniad
"Most of us would surely prefer to cross a beautiful, open bridge offering fresh air and inspiring views of London" sez critic

Calgary's Calatrava icon to be unveiled soon
No news here yet, really, although nearby heliport may reduce chance for structural acrobatics

Arup, Benthem Crouwel win bridge competition
Rusty new footbridge for Den Bosch

Brunel's Saltash Bridge celebrates 150 years
Although rust and algae draw criticism

Portland's I-5 bridge to be a battle between aesthetics and jobs?
Oregon governor happy to sacrifice aesthetics in drive to create employment?

Samuel Beckett sets sail
New Calatrava bridge leaves Rotterdam on way to Dublin

New habitable bridge proposed over Thames

Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has resurrected a proposal to build an inhabited bridge across the River Thames. He's using as a model Antoine Grumbach's design for the 1996 Thames Water Habitable Bridge competition (pictured right).

The new proposal is for a "living" bridge to run from between Waterloo and Blackfriars bridges. Johnson is quoted as seeking a bridge which:

"will once again provide a commercial zone . . . a bridge that actually has residential and commercial property on it, as the old London Bridge did".

Previous schemes for a habitable bridge in London went nowhere - I've covered the Peabody Trust proposal here previously, and will be covering the Thames Water competition in more detail in a future post. The major problem, particularly in a city as rich in history as London, is the impact of a habitable bridge on views along and across the river.

Grumbach's design is in my view a poor effort - as with many habitable bridge designs, the practicalities of creating housing on the river are fraught with difficulty, and so Grumbach's residential element is limited to riverside towers (of which there is hardly any shortage in London). Comparing with the Old London Bridge (pictured right in 1745), where people lived directly above the river, it's less romantic, and frankly less exciting.

I'll be astonished if this latest proposal actually gets anywhere - likely developers will remain financially constrained in the near future, and nervous of the extreme unlikelihood of such a scheme ever getting planning consent.

Forthside Bridge opens

The £6.5m Forthside Footbridge in Stirling, Scotland, has opened today, some twelve months behind schedule.

The footbridge (pictured right) crosses Stirling Railway Station, and provides access between the new Forthside development and the town centre.

Designed by Wilkinson Eyre and Gifford, and built by Edmund Nuttall, the new bridge comprises two 88m span inverted Fink trusses, in an unusual arrangement that makes the bridge significantly different to the only other major bridge of the same form, the Royal Victoria Dock footbridge, not to mention unbuilt designs such as Flint and Neill / Exploration Architecture's Perpignan Bridge (shown below in colour) or Mott MacDonald / Knight Architects' River Douglas Bridge (shown below in black-and-white).



The trusses are assymetrical, being higher at one end than at the other, and each truss decreases in height in the opposite direction (see extract from planning drawing on the right), such that the bridge deck is supported on each edge by a propped cantilever - but with the cantilevers in opposing directions such that there is presumably a marked tendency in the deck to twist (dealt with structurally by making the deck a flattened box girder). The inverted Fink truss is inherently inefficient, and the assymetric arrangement will have added to that, as does the fact that the trusses aren't in a vertical plane, but incline outwards from the deck at an angle which warps along the deck by 35°.

All this adds up to a bridge which is exceptionally complicated geometrically. The justification for this comes from the wish to cradle the walkway in a manner which visually echoes the pedestrian desire lines (which are at an angle to the bridge span). From the photos and images currently available, I think it's an exciting design, taking a simple structural idea and playing with it in a very interesting way. It's especially nice to see such an innovative bridge resulting from the much-maligned Design-and-Build approach, often seen as a source of poor design quality.

The bridge is 113m long overall, so for those who pay attention to such things that's a cost of £57,500 per metre length. Assuming the bridge to be typically about 4m wide (actually it varies, but the clear useable width at midspan is certainly less than 4m - see planning drawings), that's a cost of over £14,000 per square metre of deck. This is high even by the usual standards of landmark bridges (a range of £4,000 to £7,000 per square metre was about right just a couple of years ago), so Stirling Council could have had an attractive, albeit less remarkable, structure for far less.

The delays completing the bridge have been attributed by Nuttall to the complex stressing sequence required, as well as the need to verify cable connectors supplied without proper testing. The difficulties of building such a highly assymetrical structure were alluded to in a technical paper by the designers [PDF].

Overall, it's one of my favourite Wilkinson Eyre designs of recent times, and likely to be a strong contender for various design awards over the next year or two.

Updated 4 May 2009: added credit to Explorations Architecture for Perpignan Bridge, and higher-resolution image

Winner announced in Middle Rhine Valley bridge design competition

There has been a proposal for several years now to build a new bridge across the Rhine in the Upper Middle Rhine Valley, between Mainz and Koblenz at the town of St Goarshausen. It has been deeply controversial, as this part of the valley was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2002.

Near the bridge crossing is the Lorelei rock (pictured right, image courtesy of waterproof on Flickr), which is sometimes reputed to be the site where the treasure of the Nibelungen lies hidden. There are no bridges within an 80km length of the river, with crossing presently only possible by ferry.

An international bridge design competition has recently been organised, to find a bridge which is suitable for this historic location, with an estimated capital budget of 40m euros available. The contest featured some of the greatest bridge designers of recent decades: Christian Menn, Leonhardt Andrae und Partner, Wilkinson Eyre, Schlaich Bergermann, and others.

The winner has been announced as Arup with Heneghan Peng architects, the latter being perhaps best known in the bridges field for their London Olympic footbridge. Second place has been awarded to Ingenhoven Architekten, and third place to Schlaich Bergermann / Wilkinson Eyre. Prizes of 40,000, 32,000 and 18,000 euros were provided.

The winning design will now be presented to UNESCO in June, to seek their approval for this somewhat radical intervention in the Middle Rhine's picturesque landscape.

There's an interesting report [PDF] by UNESCO and ICOMOS which covers the issues in detail. The UNESCO author wrote:

"The bridge proposal should demonstrate that there is no break of scale and materials of the future construction in comparison to the existing elements of the World Heritage property (castles, villages)."

The ICOMOS representative went further:

"It should be absolutely clear and there can be no doubt that any alterations such as the erection of a modern bridge in the core of the World Heritage site would ruin the outstanding universal values which are inseparably connected with the Romantic perception of this landscape."

ICOMOS is a non-governmental body with no authority over the World Heritage Site, so it might be expected that their more extreme view will be discounted in due course.

However, it's hard to see how any of the designs match the "scale" or "materials" of the local architecture, so it will be interesting to see what view UNESCO take in June.

The winning design seems somewhat self-conscious, an attempt to be radical for its own sake. The truss and box girder combination is unlikely to be especially efficient and it makes me wonder whether a box girder on its own would have been less visually intrusive.

The Ingenhoven design takes precisely that approach, and is my favourite of the three prizewinning designs. By contrast, the Schlaich Bergermann design is a gargantuan and unusual suspension bridge, which in the visualisations seems grossly out of scale to the surroundings. I suspect the images don't do it justice, as the cables could have far more potential to disappear into the background visually.

I also like the Knight Architects design - straightforward, slender, a less aggressively modern type of bridge. The Acme entry is admirably self-effacing and has the merit of considering the river-edge landscaping carefully (I gather this was a basic requirement of the competition) - but possibly too much so, as more minimal treatment of the landscape may have been preferred by the jury.

Winner
Arup / Heneghan Peng





Second
Ingenhoven Architekten



Third
Schlaich Bergermann / Wilkinson Eyre





Others
I've only received images of two of the other entries - if anyone else would like to send their entry to happypontist at googlemail dot com, I'll include it here.

Knight Architects / Engelsmann Peters / G2 Landschaftsarchitekten




ACME / Buro Happold / Vogt Landschaftsarchitekten

Update 1 May 2009: ACME entry added