Why un-iconic bridges are placemaking assets

The word ‘iconic’ is not in my vocabulary. It has too many negative connotations, and to me implies that a design has been developed just for design’s sake, without any consideration of its public benefit. In fact, bridges that are briefed with the ambition to be iconic often work to the detriment of their communities because they can come with unnecessary costs that have to be carried by the public. Instead, bridge projects should begin with those communities, responding to bigger questions about who they are for and why they are needed, not just what they should look like. Over time a design may come to be perceived as iconic, but that definition is always an outcome, not the starting point.

Two decades of bridge design perspective

Answering those questions about who bridges are for and why they’re needed is a central part of our offer, developed over 20 years on bridge projects across the world. We’ve worked on almost every kind of bridge typology, taking very different approaches with very different collaborators across a broad range of contexts, meaning that we come to new projects with real-world perspective and the ability to see possibility where others might not. This perspective is integral to the way we support our clients and translates into greater benefit – not just for users but in the project process itself. Applied on our recent project in Drammen, Norway, co-designed with Degree of Freedom and SAAHA Architects, it enabled us to positively influence the construction methodology as well as improve the user experience.

Transport infrastructure as a catalyst for urban transformation

The city of Drammen is about 45 minutes south of Oslo by train. Until the 1990s, it had quite a bad reputation due to post-industrial decline, particularly along the polluted river that cuts the city in two and caused considerable road traffic congestion. In the last two decades this decline has been gradually reversed, and the building of new bridges as vital links within the city has formed an important part of local regeneration and modal shift initiatives. City Bridge – known locally as Bybrua – replaces an existing bridge to form the principal river crossing between Strømsø to the south and Bragernes in the north, connecting multiple transport routes into the central station and the neighbourhoods beyond. For us it has been an exciting project because of the enormous care that the client put into it, and also their openness to discussion and new ideas. Having seen the transformational effect of bridges built elsewhere in the city in recent years, their ambition was to build a high-quality link that felt like the natural continuation of two important urban squares on opposite sides of the river.

Creating character out of constraints

The cross-section of the existing bridge was not large enough to deal with the many different modes of transport – buses, pedestrians and cyclists – that used it: it was simply too narrow. But there was also a challenging set of contextual constraints. The bridge crosses electrified railway tracks running along the south bank of the river and then needs to land shortly afterwards at the same level of the river promenade. This results in a level change of seven to eight metres and relatively steep slopes at either end of the bridge. We are used to seeing symmetrical bridges because this is the natural response to external constraints and structural considerations. With arch bridges, this means that they’re usually at their tallest in the middle of the river. At Drammen, the tallest part of the new bridge is actually above the southern riverbank to give sufficient headroom to the train lines along the shore, so the resulting asymmetric geometry is very unusual. This memorable bridge silhouette, shaped by the constraints, provides the city with its own unique placemaking asset.

To avoid lengthy detours for bikes, buggies and wheelchairs negotiating the steep slopes at either end, our design extended out into the areas around each abutment, introducing a wider landscape of public stairs and inclined planes that integrate into plaza spaces. These feel like natural routes, knitting the bridge into the wider city infrastructure, so while the central span across the river is a relatively modest 85 metres long, the full length of the bridge is 280 metres.

A haptic, human-focused crossing

The new bridge is much wider than the previous crossing and around 50 per cent of the 19.4-metre-wide deck is given over to pedestrians and cyclists. It was very important to the design team that the bridge had high quality finishes and interfaces. Maybe we don’t speak about these interfaces enough, but they make a real difference to the experience of users, especially pedestrians. At Drammen the bridge has bespoke lighting, parapets and handrails. As on most of our projects, we spent a lot of time developing a beautiful parapet as standard solutions wouldn’t have allowed us to respond so closely to this specific context. The handrails, of course, are the one thing that users touch, so we wanted them to feel warm and appropriately scaled. This being Norway, we avoided steel in favour of timber: in the cold winters, peoples’ hands would freeze if they touched a metal handrail. The deck surface – of high-quality, robust granite paving – works as a linking element, connecting the two very different city plazas at either end of the bridge. The same surface is integrated into the promenade below, so the different spaces and levels ease into one another seamlessly, the bridge becoming a natural part of the urban environment.

Finding something special

Throughout the design process, our client – Drammen kommune – was very open to ideas, even if they were unexpected. At the northern end of the bridge, for example, the space is quite tight due to the slope of the deck. We explained to the client that this meant that the bridge could potentially become a barrier because, to accommodate its landing point, there wasn’t enough room to continue the promenade along the riverbank. We proposed building the promenade out from the bank, onto a terrace which actually sits above the water, supported on piles so it doesn’t obstruct the flow of the river. Our solution not only created enough room for people to pass below the bridge, but also produced a stand-out space in itself, something special that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. Sweeping steps connect the extended promenade up to deck level, creating a place where people can come and sit in the summer, eat an ice cream and watch the sunset.