How trust opens the door to possibility

Just as Knight Architects has evolved in the twenty years since I set up the practice, the things I enjoy most about the business have also evolved. In the noughties, we were primarily driven by how things looked: it was a design culture built on dramatic, blue-sky visuals. Now I’m much more interested in how bridges make people feel. How do people use bridges, what do those bridges add to a place in terms of identity, and what social benefit can they bring? But I’m also interested in how this qualitative value translates into quantitative benefit for our clients. How can we work collaboratively to create bridges that deliver as much for the owner or commissioner as they do for the user?

Problem solving is an integral part of bridge design, and we tend to design at our very best when there are lots of thorny constraints or complex brief requirements. These constraints demand creative solutions, and they often result in something valuable and beautiful.

From aesthetics to social value in bridge design

One such project is the Ely Southern Bypass, which on paper was a very conventional project when we came to it in 2012 – the final link in a new road built to resolve congestion problems caused by a busy railway level crossing. What made it unique was the setting. The bypass crosses a flood plain to the south of the city, in the foreground of the quintessential English country view. Seen at a distance across the flat fenland landscape, Ely’s medieval cathedral has been a landmark for centuries, and quite understandably, the community was upset that this vista would be lost. Our challenge was to work with them and the local authority to create an understated, visually unobtrusive structure that wouldn’t devalue the very special setting.

We brought to the project a recognition of what the community held dear. Consulting with local stakeholders, we could see how proud they were of their heritage, and how much they wanted to protect their city. But we also saw the possibility of looking at the challenge in a positive way. Here was an opportunity to add something that would be unexpected and beneficial, a win-win solution when all they could see was potential loss.

Once we had met the community, our big idea came quickly. To the low-lying multi-span road bridge, we proposed adding a footbridge, hung from the main structure but hidden from the high-speed traffic. This would create a new circular route for walkers, taking them out onto the fens and across the River Ouse. It gave a brand-new vantage point of the cathedral from the countryside that no-one had identified at the outset of the project. The local authority’s line on the map became a three-dimensional, spatial structure connecting people and place.

Securing community support and client trust to unlock better design outcomes

Firstly, we identified the biggest risks to the project progressing – getting public approval and gaining planning permission – and shaped our approach to address them. We focused on promoting the aspects of the design that were beneficial to the public, bringing them onside, and showed that the threat to the cathedral and landscape could not just be mitigated but removed entirely. This increased confidence in the design and helped to clear the project’s critical path through planning.

Secondly, in a move which took longer and was perhaps more subtle, we worked to gain the trust of our client by recognising the pressures they were under. By understanding fully their budget constraints and the raft of consents that were needed, we were able to give them solutions that were both realistic and applicable. But more than this, the trust that we built between us gave us the freedom to express ideas that we may not have done otherwise. The client was receptive to our creativity because we were always able to demonstrate the benefit of our ideas. As a result, the project was granted planning approval in 2014, with widespread support and without the need for a planning inquiry, over a decade on from when the bypass was first proposed.

Rethinking ‘iconic’ bridge design in East Leeds

Another example of how we’re able to look at problems through a different lens is in our work on the East Leeds Orbital Route. This was a large-scale initiative to improve the UK city’s infrastructure, which would in turn enable its eastward expansion. There were five bridges in the scheme and we were invited by the contractor to design one of them – a footbridge which had been designated ‘iconic’. When we questioned why that one should be iconic and not the others, the answer came back that there was only budget enough for one of the bridges to be really special. But we could see that this approach – which aligned the idea of an iconic bridge with visual flamboyance and expense – would generate a value differential between the council wards where the bridges were located, and potentially a knock-on effect on house prices and the way the communities saw themselves. 

So we pitched an idea for spreading the budget in a different way, allocating proportionately more to two highway under-bridges – a typology that tends to be less appealing for pedestrian users. With the trust of both council and our contractor client, we ended up designing all five of the structures, each slightly different but all part of the same family. Every council ward now has its own bridge and, because this is a landscape-led scheme, all have the same connectivity and access to the countryside. While only time will tell whether the bridges will make a quantifiable difference to house prices or quality of life, de-landmarking that one bridge has delivered a family of structures that everyone can own – and recognition of the scheme in awards programmes has enhanced the council’s reputation as progressive thinkers.

Trust, creativity and long-term value in bridge design

As we begin our third decade in practice, I’ve never felt more strongly that if we can build this kind of trust with clients it can open the door to better ideas, new possibilities and the kind of social benefit that inspires me. At Ely I don’t think any other designer would have suggested creating a new footbridge. It simply wasn’t in the brief. It didn’t fulfil the bridge’s prime function and so in many ways it was unnecessary, but it de-risked a project which had stalled at the planning stage. In Leeds, with the support of the contractor, we asked a very simple question that everyone else had overlooked – maybe because it was too obvious. But in both cases our architectural training led us to read between the lines, and by coming at the brief from a different direction we were able to remove risk, respect the environment and give the community something valuable and long-lasting that went far beyond the original vision.