Habitable Bridge

 A hypothetical site with a dividing river and two contrasting programs.

A habitable bridge with two opposing programs seek to ‘express’ a particular idea about the way in which individuals cross from one side to the other. Lawn bowls, a sport with the simple yet challenging objective to roll biased balls as close as possible to a smaller ball. Boilermakers, a profession that focuses on the production of steel fabrications from plates and sections.

Fritz Lang’s German 1920s sci-fi film, Metropolis, a story of the wealthy son of the city’s ruler and a poor worker and investigates the boundaries of class distinction and its social and psychological implications upon its people. This notion of this dichotomy became the underlying concept for this project and the design took a more conceptual approach.

The final bridge consists of two main elements. A “Garden of Eden” with lawn bowl/bocce ball courts and greenery. The second, a mobile boilermaker workshop that moved along as the bridge continued to be built. The workers suspended off the bridge, hanging from cables. The idea of the class distinction is clearly articulated in the hierarchy of the design.

The main idea of this habitable bridge is that the upper class aristocrats don’t realise that there are workers down below building this bridge for them. And the idea is extended on the notion that these two groups of people, rely on each other and cannot function without one another. Hence this relationship of a ‘non-relationship’ opens up a discussion on these themes that are relevant in any context of time.