Bridging inspiration: Zaha Hadid, Santiago Calatrava, and SRG Partnership

Portland firm SRG Partnership is keeping some very good company in the March issue of Architectural Record. In a long continuing-education feature devoted to pedestrian bridges, SRG’s design for an elliptical span at Seattle’s Museum of Flight is one of three projects featured, and the other two are by a couple of the most famous architects in the world: Zaha Hadid and Santiago Calatrava (both of whom should be considered for the Columbia River Crossing).

The Seattle branch of SRG (which has its original main office here), headed by Rick Zieve, FAIA, came up with the $6.4 million bridge design, which is intended to mimic the forms of jet plane contrails.

As Joann Gonchar writes in Record, “The bridge’s primary span is a 200-foot-long tube truss, about 17 feet in diameter, tapering to about 12 feet at the ends. SRG had originally hoped to make it out of pipe sections bent into ellipses…[but] the architect came up with a more cost-effective and buildable alternative: The webs are made up of two sets of 5-inch-diameter pipes bent into pure circles.”

The more than 300 bent pipes are inclined in opposite directions to overlap, giving the bridge an elliptical section even though its individual elements have a simpler geometry.

I’d also strongly recommend that readers here go to the source and check out the other two bridges featured: Calatrava’s Ponte della Constituzione in Venice (pictured below) and Hadid’s combination bridge and building that served as the entry pavilion to this past summer’s Zaragoza Expo, in Zaragoza, Spain. 

Although none of these pedestrian bridges have the same program or scale as the three Portland bridges going through design right now—the Columbia River Crossing, the light rail & pedestrian bridge on the Willamette, or the reconstructed Sellwood Bridge—but they should serve as a reminder of what great design can bring.

If we’re willing to select bridge designers with great talent and not just a track record of building other bridges, and if we’re able to craft a public process that not only gets them in place but allows them creativity, this will be the route to bridges we can all be proud of. Sure, the amount of lanes matters. So do budget and sustainable design principles. Even so, the design is what will last for generations even as other factors from the time of construction fade away.

Meanwhile, even if we get boring cookie-cutter bridges in Portland made on the cheap, we can at least congratulate SRG Partnership on a job well done in Seattle.

Comments

[Steve]

On my first trip to Portland from Michigan 18 years ago, my first impression of Oregon was puzzling, how is the largest interstate in the West crossing the largest river in the West on a drawbridge?

Given the large investment and iconic potential of a bridge like the Columbia River Crossing, I am glad the bridge will be built with additional room to handle future unforeseen needs and assure as long a lifespan as possible. Since it is easy to limit traffic with lane configurations and tollbooths, the idea of limiting traffic by building a too small bridge seemed like poor planning and had un-green potential ramifications beyond the exhaust from idling traffic.

If we had to replace this new bridge, or add another bridge in a few decades because of additional mass transit or other needs, it would be a huge waist of resources and loss or compromise of what could be an iconic structure representing Oregon and Washington.

Now that the size debate is over, let’s work with the State of Washington to make the Columbia River Crossing the big, bold, iconic structure that does justice to the bridge’s grand setting and symbolic function, a bridge in which the NW region can take pride for at least the next century.