From the Bottom of the Sea: A Bridge That Fakes Its Own Collapse to Warn of Rising Water

Most bridges want to look permanent. This one wants to look broken. From the Bottom of the Sea plants two sculptural fragments above a canal, tilted like the halves of a span torn apart, and lets the viewer assume the worst. The real crossing is hidden in plain sight, running below the water level, where pedestrians and cyclists move between the banks while the skyline performs a disaster that has not happened yet. The ruin is a warning; the working bridge is the answer.

Designed by Erika Tiella and Beatrice Tabac in response to a competition brief for a canal crossing, the project treats climate-resilient infrastructure as a matter of narrative as much as engineering. The designers borrow from the 1955 film It Came from Beneath the Sea and recast its monster as rising sea levels, an imminent force capable of swallowing cities that fail to build resilience into their fabric.

A Kraken Storyboard Sets the Brief Before the Architecture Does

The presentation opens not with plans but with storyboard panels: a bridge in a night city, purple tentacles climbing out of the canal toward a giant eye, then a title board with an octopus coiled beneath a moonlit row of townhouses. It is a deliberate mid-century cinematic register, and it does real work. Before any drawing of the bridge appears, the viewer already understands what it is defending against.

The designers point out that monsters have stood in for collective fear since antiquity, and that in the 1950s the fear was nuclear. Swapping that anxiety for climate instability is a sharp move, because it frames rising water not as a statistic but as a character with intent. The kraken becomes the client the bridge is really designed for.

Two Ochre Fragments Perform a Collapse That Never Happened

The perspective illustration makes the illusion legible: two tilted ochre volumes with perforated walls lean over the canal, sailboats slipping between them, small figures walking along the edge under a full moon. Read quickly, it is the aftermath of a structural failure. Read carefully, both volumes are intact, and each carries part of the programme required by the brief.

The project splits that programme cleanly. The right block is given over to public activation, intended to turn the crossing into a civic destination rather than a corridor. The left block holds operational and logistic functions. Separating the two keeps circulation clear and gives each half of the false ruin a distinct role, so the gesture of destruction is backed by a practical organisation of use.

The Real Crossing Runs Beneath the Waterline

The one-point perspective drops the viewer into a narrow passage between ochre walls, with cyclists, a child and a dog moving through in silhouette. This is the horizontal element, the part of the bridge that actually connects the banks, set below the water level and dedicated to pedestrians and cyclists, with generous bike parking built into it. The scale is intimate, closer to a street than a deck, and the warm walls carry the same material language as the volumes above.

Placing the crossing underneath solves a constraint in the brief elegantly: the bridge stays permanently open, so boat traffic along the canal is never interrupted, and no mechanical lifting or swinging is needed. Rather than treating water as something to hold back, the design lets it pass overhead while daily mobility continues below. That inversion is the project's most persuasive argument for adaptive infrastructure.

A Night Silhouette That Turns Infrastructure Into Theatre

The night elevation pushes a large perforated wedge into the corner of the frame, with sailboats crossing the canal front. From the water, the inclined geometry reads as a bridge caught mid-opening, a dynamic silhouette against the dark sky that sailors see long before they reach it. The perforations suggest a lantern-like presence after dark, giving the volumes a second life once the city lights come on.

On land, the oblique forms do something quieter: they pull passers-by toward the canal edge out of curiosity. The skyline becomes a stage, and the bridge becomes a landmark not because of its size but because it looks like it is in the middle of an event. That theatricality is what lets the structure carry a message about climate risk without a single sign or plaque.

Why This Project Matters

Climate-adaptive design is often communicated through diagrams of flood levels and resilience metrics, which persuade engineers but rarely stop a pedestrian in their tracks. Tiella and Tabac take the opposite route. By staging a collapse, they make the threat visible at urban scale, and by hiding a functioning crossing beneath it, they show that adaptation can be ordinary, usable and even pleasant.

The project's lesson for young designers is that storytelling is not decoration layered onto a scheme; here it is the method that generates the form. The kraken, the false ruin and the submerged passage all belong to one argument: that cities will have to learn to live with water rather than against it, and that infrastructure can say so out loud.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Erika Tiella, Beatrice Tabac

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Project credits: From the Bottom of the Sea by Erika Tiella, Beatrice Tabac.