Spaceflowing Bridge Connects!

Bridges can be landmarks, the world-known bridge - the Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco connecting San Francisco downtown and Sasaulito, has already become the most iconic landmark of the city with its significant historical and cultural symbols. In addition, bridges are not just playing the role of connecting different places separated by rivers, cliffs, oceans, etc. But also can act as a carrier or infrastructure to host various activities related to people’s daily lives, not just showing how advanced human technology’s development is.

In our vision of this design, the bridge connecting Manhattan and Long Island City can be the playground for people who travel to these cities pendulumly besides being people’s walking and cycling daily routine. People in the city of New York are energetic and fond of various kinds of cultural events, you can easily see people singing and dancing on the street, different shapes of sculptures, wood benches, and so on. Those are the exciting parts that we would love to bring into our bridge design. Just like the Highline in Manhattan, people’s daily walking routine but already becomes part of the local people’s social lives.

In our design, the whole bridge contains three parts; the first part is from Manhattan to Roosevelt Island, the second part is the connecting part in Roosevelt Island lets passing people go down to the island ground and go up to the third part of the bridge connecting Roosevelt Island to Long Island City.

So our strategy is to bend the traditional straight bridge form into curvature with several circles on different levels, each enclosed circle will provide spaces for people to gather and host cultural events or activities such as small size open-air concerts, dancing performances, and other activities which people usually do in the New York City. The slope surface in a curved shape can be formed as amphitheater steps letting people sit down. Each side of the bridge has two or three hubs like this.

For the structure design level, two bridge towers on both riversides lifting two circle slopes with steel strings, the bottom of the bridge is around 15 meters above the East River surface, so it makes sure boats and regular ferries go underneath.