Floating Islands: A Copenhagen Bridge That Splits Into Two Planted Hills to Let Boats Pass

Most opening bridges treat the moment of opening as an interruption: barriers drop, traffic waits, a deck lifts out of the way. Floating Islands reverses that logic. When its two symmetrical halves rotate apart to clear a 25-metre channel, the planted roofs drift into separate green landforms on the water, and the bridge briefly becomes the thing its name promises. The crossing is designed so that its most technical moment is also its most memorable one.

Designed by Marceli Sobański, Bartek Bruzda and Paweł Danielak, the project takes Copenhagen's cycling culture as its starting brief. The designers treat the bicycle as one of the most efficient, ecological and democratic ways to move through a city, and they argue that infrastructure serving it should do more than carry traffic. Their answer is a 100-metre structure that combines a separated cycle and pedestrian crossing with a landscaped public square lifted above the river.

Two Gentle Hills Hide the Structure and Hold a Square

The opening view shows the project's central claim at human scale. Visitors sit on a grassy slope beneath young trees and face the rowhouses across the water. Nothing in the frame reads as a bridge deck. The designers shaped the crossing into two gently rising symmetrical forms, and the structural mass sits inside those slopes instead of being expressed as girders or cables. Between the hills, a valley-like central plateau opens up at roughly the scale of a small urban square, kept relatively flat so that views along the river stay uninterrupted.

The trees along the roofline do quiet but important work. They soften the silhouette from the quays, and from on top they screen the city behind and turn attention toward the water. The result is a slender profile that does not compete with the skyline. The roof also changes how the structure's surface area is counted: a conventional deck would offer a narrow strip of circulation, while this one adds usable civic ground above the routes beneath.

Separate Lanes Below, Slopes for Lingering Above

The interior view adds a layer the exterior renders only suggest. A long timber table with bar stools runs beneath a copper pendant, and a figure walks toward a full-height glass wall. The bridge holds enclosed space as well as open ground, and the warm palette sets it apart from the hard infrastructure it replaces. Around it, the program keeps movement and pause apart. Cyclists and pedestrians get dedicated routes for a safe, collision-free crossing, while the planted surfaces overhead take on the slower uses.

Those slopes are where the proposal becomes genuinely civic. The designers describe the hills as natural amphitheatres, suited to outdoor cinema screenings, small performances and community gatherings, with the gradient itself providing informal seating. It is an economical move: one landform supplies structure, shelter, seating and stage, so the event program needs no added furniture or platforms.

A 25-Metre Opening Staged as a Public Event

Seen from the paved quay, the bridge reads as a curving building more than a span. The planted roof rides over a glazed side, and the mass appears to float above the canal edge. This is the form that splits. Each of the two symmetrical sections rotates on its own axis to open a 25-metre navigable channel, and the mechanism is deliberately simple: two matching halves, one motion.

What makes the gesture persuasive is that the opened state gets as much design attention as the closed one. Rotated apart, the halves become two green islands, and the people on them gain shifting views of the city as the structure moves. Many kinetic bridges choreograph their machinery and leave the experience of it to chance. Here the engineering is the spectacle, and the spectacle is a landscape changing shape in front of the city.

A Figure-Eight Worked Out in Ink

The concept sheet shows the idea before it was smoothed into renders. In plan, section and axonometric, the designers draw a twisting figure-eight, and the labels for a cafe, a workshop and public space show that the program was being negotiated alongside the geometry from the start. The loops explain the symmetry: two linked halves meeting at a central node, each able to act alone when the bridge opens.

The sketches are worth reading for their honesty. The ink lines test how a continuous surface can twist from ground to roof and back, the same move that later hides the structure inside the hills. It is a reminder that the floating-island image was the outcome of a spatial argument about the bridge's form, not a starting picture the structure was made to fit.

Why This Project Matters

Cities building for cyclists often stop at the lane: a painted strip, a protected path, a safer crossing. Floating Islands argues that cycling infrastructure can also produce public space. By stacking a separated mobility route beneath a landscaped square and an amphitheatre, the proposal treats a river crossing as a place to arrive at as well as a link between banks. That is a useful provocation for any city where bridges are planned solely by traffic engineers.

The project's sharpest insight is its refusal to hide the opening mechanism or apologise for it. Instead of treating the 25-metre navigation requirement as a constraint to be minimised, Sobański, Bruzda and Danielak make it the moment the bridge earns its name. Questions remain about how the planted mass and enclosed rooms behave in motion, but the core idea holds: infrastructure that is legible, inhabitable and a little theatrical gives a city more reasons to use it.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Marceli Sobański, Bartek Bruzda, Paweł Danielak

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Project credits: Floating Islands by Marceli Sobański, Bartek Bruzda, Paweł Danielak.