Terraces Park: A T-Shaped Bridge Building Strung Across the Stepped Walls of an Open-Pit Mine

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Q: What is "Terraces Park: A T-Shaped Bridge Building Strung Across the Stepped Walls of an Open-Pit Mine" about?

This article covers topics related to Landscape Design, Transportation. A shortlisted proposal that bridges a toxic mining pit with a solar-skinned deck, an inner garden and a rooftop park, and asks what repair should weigh

An open-pit mine is a mountain turned inside out. Every terrace on its walls records a season of extraction, and the deeper the hole, the more the ground loses its ability to hold life. The question any intervention faces is blunt: do you heal the void, or do you build across it?

Terraces Park, designed by Si Nguyen, chooses to build across it. The project is listed under Sudan, while its description places the site at Corta Atalaya in Spain, described as one of the largest mining sites in Europe, with a severely toxic environment. The concept aims to give the pit better transportation and clean water, bringing life back while respecting the existing landscape. The proposal was Shortlisted at Symbiotecture.

Two Bridges Strung Across a Red Amphitheatre

The opening render frames the mine as an amphitheatre of rust-coloured steps descending toward a pool of water. Two bridge structures span the pit at different depths: one far off near the rim, one closer and lower, its arms reaching across the terraces. The dusk sky does a lot of work here, turning a scarred landscape into something closer to a canyon at sunset.

What the image establishes is the project's basic move. Rather than descending the terraces or occupying them, the architecture hovers. Circulation is solved by spanning, shortening the distance from one edge of the pit to the other, while the water at the bottom remains visible as the thing the project wants to restore.

Rendered view of terraced red quarry walls with two bridge structures spanning the pit under a blue to orange dusk sky. Image: Si Nguyen

A T-Shaped Deck That Stacks Parking, Rooms and an Archaeological Roof

The drawings reveal a building that is really a layered bridge. Three T-shaped floor plans and the diagram sheet sort the program vertically: a passing bridge and parking lot on the first level, a volume division of smaller programmed blocks on the second, and an archaeological park on the roof. The axonometric section shows the deck carried on broad arched supports, and the cross section drops the whole structure into the stepped profile of the pit, with water pooled at its lowest point.

The logic is clear and diagrammatically clean, which is also where the critique lands. Alessandro Melis, who judged the competition, credited the spatial development and presentation while questioning the sheer quantity of new structure set into an existing void.

The project is spatially well developed and consistent with the premises. The design also achieves a remarkable degree of precision and detail in presentation. However, the perplexity remains that in such a context one could think of a concept with less massive structures and more integrated with the context. This would probably have implied a lower investment in building structures, in order to optimize the impact of the embodied energy by taking advantage of the existing one.Alessandro Melis, Director, Heliopolis 21, United Kingdom

Drawing sheet with three T-shaped floor plans, an axonometric section of the arched bridge and a cross section of the stepped pit with water. Image: Si Nguyen

Diagram sheet with isometric sequence drawings, level breakdowns, sun rotation path and facade structure layers above a rendered terraced pit. Image: Si Nguyen

A Diamond Lattice Skin Tuned to the Sun

The facade is the most tactile part of the proposal. Rust-coloured diagonal frames hold curved blue solar glass panels, wrapping the bridge in a scaled skin that reads almost like armour against the red canyon wall. The study sheet tracks a sun rotation path across the T-shaped form and breaks the envelope into structure layers, suggesting the panels are positioned with orientation in mind rather than applied as decoration.

The colour pairing is deliberate: the weathered frame echoes the mineral tones of the terraces, while the blue glass picks up the sky. It is one of the few moments where the structure tries to speak the language of the ground it sits in.

Close-up of rust-colored diagonal frames holding curved blue solar glass panels beside a red canyon wall under scattered clouds. Image: Si Nguyen

A Tree Rising Through a Circular Opening

Inside, the project slows down. A single tree climbs through a circular roof opening, ringed by concentric bands of lawn and paving, with planting at its base and visitors lingering at the edges. The diamond lattice wall filters the view outward, so the barren landscape beyond becomes a backdrop seen through pattern.

This courtyard is the clearest translation of the brief's ambition to bring life back. It stages renewal as an interior event: a protected garden held within the bridge while the pit around it remains raw. The gesture is persuasive at human scale, even if it raises the question of how far that life extends beyond the building's footprint.

Rendered courtyard with a central tree rising through a circular roof opening, ringed by lawn and visitors under a diamond lattice wall. Image: Si Nguyen

When the Infrastructure Outweighs the Landscape

At night the bridge becomes a lit object floating above a pink-lit pool, its interior glowing along the length of the T. The image is striking, and it also exposes the tension that runs through the whole scheme: the pit becomes a stage for the structure rather than the other way round.

Carlos Campos, who judged the competition, put this tension plainly, praising the engineering of the bridges and platforms while warning about their weight on the site.

An ambitious project. Well dimensioned engineering devices. (bridges, platforms). However, put in context, it is very destructive in relation to the landscape. Its constructive force takes too much prominence.Carlos Campos, Architect / Professor, ccyza architects, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Night render of the T-shaped bridge with glowing interior lights above a pink-lit pool in the terraced pit. Image: Si Nguyen

Why This Project Matters

Terraces Park is valuable precisely because it makes a confident argument that can be debated. It treats a toxic mine not as a site to be hidden but as a landscape worth crossing, programming and inhabiting, with clean water, solar energy and a garden at the heart of the scheme. Its stacked section, from parking to rooms to rooftop park, shows how a single linear structure can carry transport and public life at once.

The jury's reservations sharpen the lesson. Repairing post-industrial ground raises the question of how much new material it is fair to add, and whether the most respectful move is a lighter one that works with what extraction has already left behind. Terraces Park stakes out the ambitious end of that spectrum, and in doing so makes the case for its opposite worth thinking through.