The Gauja National Park Footbridge Competition seeks innovative designs for a footbridge that will serve as a symbolic gateway to the park, celebrating its 45th anniversary. The footbridge, suspended over a road, must accommodate high volumes of pedestrian traffic and be tall enough for trucks and buses to pass underneath. It should also feature welcoming and farewell signage, along with a park information stand.
Designers are challenged to consider the buildability of their designs, ensuring they harmonize with the park’s context, welcome visitors, display innovation, and have the potential to become an internationally recognized landmark.
Our project transcends the utilitarian definition of a single optimal object, extending our attention to the surrounding space. For this purpose we’ve proliferated the footbridge pattern and extended our design-research to the landscape, creating new opportunities for additional services for visitors that will make the location a unique place to visit and stay.
The structurally sound footbridge, consists of two main load-bearing wooden arches and a secondary steel perforated skin, which serves as anti-skid flooring as well as a shelter from strong southern winds by shape. Together with the multipurpose landscape that connects the entire area surrounding the footbridge, it will catalyse new urban dynamics ant a wide range of social and sport activities, with an architectural language intimately linked to the site’s morphological nature and an expression of superior design intelligence borrowed from Nature.
The complex design is supported by an advanced design approach oriented towards the digital fabrication of all building components to ensure a precise and time-effective non-serial prefabrication of the entire structure.
We studied the project scenario as a high-potential node of Sigulda’s urban system. Unfolding a systemic approach, we investigated people’s behaviour across the area through the analysis of their shared GPS tracking data. This revealed numerous behaviours and informal paths across the project area, suggesting unexpected design opportunities to activate new urban, social, and economic dynamics beyond the initial need.
Inspired by Etienne-Jules Marey’s investigation on form in space and time, our design research borrowed his techniques to investigate the hopping sequence of the Rhinella frog. We chose the frog because of its long jump relative to its size and its starting and landing position, which resembles the structural and construction needs of a bridge. Our design strategy exploits the organic behaviour of the frog’s jump, refined selectively over millions of years, to give our bridge a form that is a manifestation of a superior material system intelligence.
Our footbridge proposal uses Kerto LVL, a laminated veneer lumber product known for its strength and easy workability with digital manufacturing procedures. To protect the timber against the elements, Kerto panels will be sprayed with a 2mm layer of two-component polyurethane, providing a UV-protective, waterproof, vapor-permeable coating. This lightweight structure ensures lower maintenance costs than a steel solution.
Despite the apparent tectonic richness, the footbridge’s construction will be more cost-effective than traditional solutions at it is suppose to be enterely prefabricated off-site. Moreover, differentiated and redundant structural systems help save up to 60% of the total weight, making it cost-effective and environmentally friendly. The main structural load-bearing parts, the wooden side arches, as well as all other perforated metal panels, will be efficiently produced via digital fabrication, reducing waste material and eliminating construction errors.
+ Year
2019
+Results
Project shortlisted
+ Keywords
#digital #fabrication #parametric #design #urbanism #material #system #biomimetic #wood #footbridge #digitalwood
