AREP Blog

Taking cues from fields as far abreast as contemporary dance to dark-sky light plotting, our design for this river bridge finds its coherence in merging a performative approach to material use. The result can be easily named a hybrid structural design, with an efficient use of materials. Does this do justice to the innovation involved in this three-tiered structure, or the cadences of car traffic and pedestrian movement we created within the bridge itself? Only partially

To borrow from influential drawings of choreographic pathways of Lucinda Childs’ dances or Sol Lewit’s appropriation of them as projections and wall-drawings in their collaboration Dance of 1979, gave us the impetus to create a new interstial space within the bridge structure, a space of new pathways – both straight and variable with the signature half-curves of Childs’ mapped movements.

These early experiments for the stage by Childs, informed our design to create a stage for visitors using the bridge – a horizontal linear walking or biking path to the half-arch sitting areas overlooking the river. The possible criss-crossing of the walking paths and the undulating compound surfaces of the arches, allows for complex pathways – a three-dimensional choreographic score not seen in any other bridge design.

The use of Child’s mapping diagrams, serial motifs, and their multiple combinations were a source in defining our design – placing movement and the human body foremost in our thoughts as we experimented with spanning forms for this bridge. The result is in essence a serial structure that is both structurally stable, yet formally enigmatic with its rising and falling double-curvature arches towards the water.

It is this very form that renders the bridge and arches stable, resistant to span large distances – by use of repetitive sinous curves – as well as visually rhythmic and spectacular with not one viewpoint the same: a choreographic movement in space.

The three-tiered structural design with an open network – or forest – of slender metal columns, allows us to create a new occupied area on top of the shell arches below the roadway – a social gathering space – not found in any other bridge. Open to views over the river to the East and West, it serves as a pedestrian walkway and bike-path, separated from the noise of the car traffic above.

As each shell arch reaches down to the river they form a series of steps – like an amphitheater -  to view the landscaped site.  These same steps serve to bring the public down to the river’s edge at end of the last arch.

The areas on top of the undulating shell arches are free for people to walk, run or bike along the flat middle line of the sinuous arches – a choreographic space of multiple pathways.  Thus the Guishui bridge indeed forms the support of a three-dimensional dance a la Lucinda Childs.