Infinity Bridge: A Rotating Copenhagen Crossing That Turns a Bike Route Into a Public Room

Most movable bridges treat opening as an interruption: traffic stops, people clear the deck, and the structure lifts out of the way. Infinity Bridge reverses that logic. Its two halves swing horizontally around their tower axes, and the people sitting at its centre stay where they are, drifting apart as the channel opens and meeting again when it closes. The opening becomes the event rather than the inconvenience, and that single decision sets the tone for a project that wants a bridge to be a place, not just a passage.

Designed by Maryam Rezaeizadeh, the project is set in Copenhagen, a city defined by its canals, its maritime past and one of the most mature cycling cultures in the world. Rezaeizadeh draws on all three. The structure borrows the language of a sail held by cables, the plan bends into an infinity loop, and the section splits into a dedicated cycling path above a sheltered civic floor below. The result is infrastructure that doubles as a café, a bike workshop and a viewing platform.

Masts, Cables and a Sail Stretched Over the Water

The opening render puts the maritime reference front and centre. Mast-like towers rise from the deck and a tensile cable system pulls the glazed canopy taut, much as rigging tensions a sail. Under a heavy Danish sky, cyclists and a wheelchair user share the approach, a quiet signal that the crossing is meant for every kind of movement. The image matters because it shows the structure and the symbolism doing the same job: the cables that carry load are also the ones that tell the story of the city's sailing vessels.

The sail metaphor could easily have stayed decorative. Here it shapes the engineering vocabulary, and that is what lets the bridge read as a piece of Copenhagen rather than a generic cable-stayed span dropped onto a canal.

An Undercroft Turned Into a Living Room

The two-level section is the project's most practical move. A gently sloped upper path keeps bicycles moving without interruption, while the floor beneath becomes a gathering level that would otherwise be dead structural space. The first image shows this lower realm framed by a curved white balustrade and planters, with the oval glazed canopy floating overhead. The second looks up through the lattice canopy toward a central pylon, with parked bicycles and visitors standing beneath it, so the structure itself becomes the ceiling of the room.

Separating fast and slow movement vertically is a smart way to avoid the friction that usually plagues shared bridges. Cyclists keep their line, pedestrians get room to linger, and the central seating area opens panoramic views across the city. The design is clearly built to make people stop, which is a rare ambition for a crossing.

Glass Edges That Shelter Without Closing Off

Angled glass panels mark the entrances and shield the gathering floor from wind and rain, a sensible response to Copenhagen's climate. This view across the deck shows how those walls work alongside planters and a central counter to define zones without blocking sightlines to the water. The programme packed into this level is broad: seating zones, cafés, lounges, retail, and a full set of bicycle facilities including stores, workshops, parking and repair areas.

That cycling programme is the project's argument made physical. Rather than simply carrying bikes across the water, the bridge services them, positioning cycling as a low-cost, zero-emission backbone of the city and placing the support infrastructure exactly where riders already pass.

A Pinched Waist That Swings Open to 38 Metres

The plan and elevation reveal the geometry behind the concept. Instead of a straight deck, the bridge follows an infinity-shaped loop that pinches at mid-span, with the two pylons anchoring each lobe. The symmetry gives cyclists two natural starting points at either end and balances the gathering floor around the centre. The pinched waist is also where the bridge comes apart: the southern half rotates to the right and the northern half to the left, each pivoting around its tower axis.

At 45 degrees of rotation, the halves open a 38-metre-wide channel, more than the minimum maritime clearance requires. The mechanism can continue to 90 degrees, and because the movement is horizontal rather than vertical, the deck never needs to be evacuated. The central seating platform splits as the bridge opens and rejoins as it closes, turning a routine operational cycle into a small piece of urban theatre, much like a sailboat swinging into its berth.

Why This Project Matters

Infinity Bridge takes a familiar urban problem, the movable bridge that disrupts everyone whenever a boat passes, and turns it into the project's identity. The horizontal rotation, the separation of cyclists from lingering pedestrians, and the use of the undercroft as a sheltered civic room all come from one consistent idea: that a crossing in a city like Copenhagen should reward people for staying on it. The plan's infinity loop is more than a symbol of continuity; it is the geometry that makes the split and reunion possible.

There are open questions a next stage would need to answer, from how services and the cycling path behave during rotation to how the glazed lower level performs through a Nordic winter. Still, the proposal shows real clarity in tying structure, programme and movement into a single gesture. Rezaeizadeh treats infrastructure as public space, and in doing so offers a convincing picture of what a bridge built around bicycles and people, rather than around traffic, might feel like.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Maryam Rezaeizadeh

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Project credits: Infinity Bridge by Maryam Rezaeizadeh.