Architects: CA-DESIGN / Architecture and Urban Planning Location: Qingpu, Shanghai, China Director in charge: Pedro Pablo Arroyo Alba Project year: 2010 Photographs: Montse Zamorano & CA-Group
The Xidayinggang Twin Bridges will be the most important landmark of the future expansion of Qingpu. The objective is to provide the city for a symbolic structure, reasonable, inexpensive, and avant-garde at the same time.
Given the scale of the structure, we propose the combination of arches as the most suitable solution. In reaction to the context, the angle of the river and roads with the axis of the bridges, we make the arches jumping from side to side of the deck. Since the heights of the arches are proportional to their spans, they don’t touch each other. The rotating stiffeners generate a series of virtual surfaces of double curvature, which emphasize the dynamism of the space. It is crucial to control the continuity of the arches at the ground level, and their connections with the deck, tangent and intersecting, which make the cables to alternate the alignment of their anchoring points.
The “balanced asymmetry” of the project resembles the profile of a chain of DNA, as metaphor of the vitality of the new city.
