The Art of the Bridge

IABSE Symposium Report, 2010

Trend in pedestrian bridge design are going to overreach the simple idea of connecting point A and point B. As growing communities have sought to define and differentiate themselves, footbridge design has become an aesthetically pleasant way for communities or neighborhoods to create a landmark. Such bridges are incorporating more thoughtful designs, complex engineering, and elegant materials as civic revisionists look to pedestrian bridges to make a statement. In this context technological advances have helped architects and engineers celebrate bridges' structural forms. Computer-aided techniques in particular allow designers to create complex shapes and to investigate new structural systems and schemes often through a computational morphogenesis process. Starting from these considerations, the paper first presents a review and discussion of recent realizations in the field of pedestrian bridges, calling into evidence how design is more and more requiring a multidisciplinary approach, involving the integration of architectural and engineering disciplines. This discussion drives the presentation of some examples that are given in the last section of the paper. In particular, a few examples of unconventional structural forms potentially implementing some of the most challenging concepts previously indicated, and suitable for the realization of pedestrian bridges are presented and discussed.

IABSE Symposium, Venice 2010: Large Structures and Infrastructures for Environmentally Constrained and Urbanised Areas, 2010

This paper analyses how urban bridges respond to a different set of rules from road bridges when choosing its bridge type, and developing its design. While road bridges adopt one or other bridge type only based on technical restraints, cost, function and structural efficiency, with limited resulting span scopes suitable for each bridge typology. Urban bridges and footbridges can adopt these designs out of its strict span scope, as no structural predetermination exists, responding to different new factors as: aesthetics, architectural scale, landscape integration, users’ perception, urban planning flexibility, landmark or symbol creation.Examples of urban bridges design are used, including recent arch and cable stayed bridges by Arenas & Asociados. Conclusions attempt to create some simple rules for urban bridge design, as result of local conditions and architectural restraints.

2015

Procedia Engineering, 2012

The article dwells on a new structural solution for pedestrian steel suspension bridges. This new structural system of pedestrian stress-ribbon bridges includes suspension members with bending stiffness and a pre-stressed tie. The article looks into the behaviour of such suspension bridge under symmetrical and asymmetrical loads; it also presents analytical expressions for displacements, thrust forces and bending moments of such stiff suspension members. Then the article explains the effect of the cable's bending stiffness and the tie's axial stiffness on the bridge's stresses as well as the effect of the tie's pre-stressing on horizontal and vertical displacements of the bridge structure. The article then proceeds to comparative analysis, which considers the new structure and a traditional pedestrian suspension bridge. Numerical experiment determines the accuracy of the new engineering method developed for the analysis of stress-ribbon bridges. The efficiency of steel stress-ribbon bridge displacement stabilization through the bending stiffness is being discussed.

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2005

A major obstacle for pedestrians south of the Indiana-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) campus is Coliseum Boulevard: a main arterial for the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana, which has an average daily traffic (ADT) of 50,000 vehicles. With this high ADT value, crossing by foot can not only be challenging, but can be dangerous. Thus, a pedestrian bridge over Coliseum Boulevard was proposed to allow for easy, safe travel over this busy roadway. Cohering to the innovative design concepts of both the Willis Family Bridge and the Venderly Family Bridge that already exist on the IPFW campus, the new bridge should be designed so that it too can be transformed into a landmark for the IPFW campus as the other two bridges have become. This paper presents the conceptual design of the pedestrian bridge considering four potential bridge concepts as well as the modeling, analysis and design details for the selected arch type pedestrian bridge. The selected concept for the pedestrian bridge was ana...

Elektronički časopis građevinskog fakulteta Osijek, 2021

By the start of the 21st century, the majority of the world’s population was living in cities. Therefore, a top priority has been solving the problem of connecting parts of the city divided by traffic infrastructure in the shortest possible manner by using pedestrian paths. The aim of this study was to analyze, systematize, and typologically define the specific types of structures that make this possible, specifically pedestrian bridges located above roads and railway corridors. The primary and secondary requirements that must be met when designing a pedestrian bridge were identified, and an analysis and comparison of examples of constructed pedestrian bridges in Croatia and the world are herein presented. The results of this study enable the conclusion that, in recent times, in the age of the spectacle society and spectacle architecture, pedestrian bridges are simultaneously deemed architecture, engineering, and infrastructure projects. They are becoming new elements in a city’s im...

IABSE Symposium, Madrid 2014: Engineering for Progress, Nature and People, 2014

The design of bridges within the highway infrastructure is mostly driven by very cost-optimized and function-based concepts. To raise public acceptance an architectural revision is often undertaken in the design process resulting in very surface-orientated and wrapped-over design ideas using for example colours, haptic effects and cladding. Many solutions remind on historic examples where technics and art were separately treated and displayed causing not only higher expenses but also maintenance problems. In order to adequately combine aesthetics with economical and technical requirements when operating publicly financed highway infrastructure a merged approach is pursued. The aim of this paper is to challenge engineers to be more involved into the creative process of finding suitable aesthetical forms in addition to its structural duties. He is invited to take advantage of the ingenious process of "Structural Shaping" which involves the engineer-technical thinking combined with a sense of evolving aesthetical structures based on structural approaches. In 2010 the Austrian motorway and expressway operator, ASFINAG, launched a design initiative to improve the appearance of its highway and expressway network. With a design guideline for bridges the ASFINAG focuses on the aforesaid targets.