Telling Bridge: Hans Christian Andersen's Pages Unfolded as a Harbour Crossing in Copenhagen

Most bridges are measured by how quickly they get you to the other side. The Telling Bridge asks you to slow down and read it. Its deck is shaped like loose pages from a storybook drifting on the water, corners rolled up as if someone were mid-turn through a favourite tale. That single image, drawn from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, drives the bridge's structure, programme and lighting. It turns a pedestrian and cycling crossing into a public room that happens to span a harbour.

Designed by XIAO LIN, Lee Mika and Yue Cao, the project proposes a new landmark for Copenhagen's Inner Harbour, a waterfront where crossings already double as social space. The team treats the bridge as an extension of the city's public realm rather than a piece of transit plumbing. The undulating surface separates into open gathering terraces, intimate seating steps and cycling lanes, and a set of ecological and mechanical systems ties culture and infrastructure into one gesture.

Curled Page Edges Become Seating Steps and a Planted Cycle Deck

The two renders show the same idea in opposite light. At night, the rolled edge of a 'page' rises into stepped seating beside a paved cycling deck, and people settle onto it as cyclists pass under a full moon. By day, the deck reads as a plank-paved corridor lined with lavender and grasses, with a sailboat crossing the view beyond. The curl does real spatial work: it peels people who want to linger away from people who want to move, without a single barrier or bollard.

The planting is more than softening. The designers specify landscaped beds of native species chosen to shift with the seasons, bringing biodiversity into a hard harbour edge and tempering the microclimate on an exposed span. Lighting follows the geometry: LED strips trace the contours of each page and mark movement lines, so the night version of the bridge explains its own circulation. The renders lean towards atmosphere, but the logic underneath is consistent. The narrative form and the functional zoning come from the same move.

Two Lifting Leaves That Fan Open Like Turned Pages

The aerial night view shows the bridge's boldest claim. Two glowing, colourfully lit segments reach across the dark water while a motorboat slips between them. The design describes two single-level panels, shaped like folded pages, that lift to let boats through. Once raised, they form a sculptural fan suspended over the harbour, so the necessary act of opening becomes the bridge's most theatrical moment. Copenhagen's harbour has plenty of moving bridges, and few of them make their mechanism the point.

The detail that matters most is the central access lane, which keeps pedestrians and cyclists moving while parts of the bridge are activated. That is a sensible answer to a common weakness of opening bridges, where every lift stops the city. The team also proposes a water purification system beneath the deck, with aquatic plants and filtration layers working to improve harbour water quality. The idea is promising but sketched only lightly in the material. The next step would be to show how filtration beds coexist with the moving panels and the boat channel.

One Deck Programmed for Commuting by Day and Performance by Night

The presentation board makes the bridge legible as a system. An axonometric function diagram sits alongside tree and planting palettes, paving samples and paired sketches of the deck in daily mode and event mode. In daily mode the structure works as an efficient commuter route for non-motorised traffic. In event mode, portions of the bridge open up and turn into performance spaces and public terraces, and the night lighting recasts the span as a floating cultural venue.

This dual programming is where the storybook metaphor earns its place. A page can carry a quick line or a whole scene, and the deck works the same way: it carries a commute in the morning and an audience at night. The material palette on the board, timber-toned planks, planted beds and selected trees, keeps the surface warm enough to sit on and varied enough to read as a sequence of rooms rather than a single long ribbon.

Why This Project Matters

The Telling Bridge argues that infrastructure can carry cultural meaning without sacrificing performance. Its page-turning form organises circulation, generates seating, frames the opening mechanism and gives the lighting scheme a clear logic. Copenhagen is a city whose bridges are often its liveliest public spaces, and this proposal builds on that tradition by designing for lingering, performance and ecology from the outset rather than adding them afterwards.

There are open questions, particularly around how the purification layers, planting beds and lifting panels resolve structurally into one deck. Still, XIAO LIN, Lee Mika and Yue Cao have found a metaphor that does more than decorate. It is a useful reminder for young designers that a strong narrative idea is most convincing when it solves spatial problems, and here the story and the section are the same drawing.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: XIAO LIN, Lee Mika, Yue Cao

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Project credits: Telling Bridge by XIAO LIN, Lee Mika, Yue Cao.