RETHINK REUSE recently announced the winning entries in their Transforming Seattle’s 520 Floating Bridge 2012 International Design Ideas Competition. With the goal of envisioning new, innovative reuse strategies, the winners successfully answer the questions: What is a floating bridge when its function is no longer needed? What can designers do when faced with the design problem of reusing thirty-three floating concrete pontoons? More images and information on the winners after the break.
First Place Title: South Park Food Bridge Team: David Dahl and Nicole Lew This project Reuses the 520 pontoons to reclaim the South Park riverfront as a productive, healing and community-centered landscape.
Second Place Title: Spirit Pavilion Team: Jon Gentry and Aimee O’Carroll A series of site specific island installations that allow for a variety of programmatic responses to the unusual, multi-faceted site of the floating pontoon. Over time the islands return to dock alongside a linear park.
Third Place Title: Sea Quilt Team: Rikako Wakabayashi and Sen Ando Each pontoon drifts and migrates to each of Seattle’s wide-spread neighborhoods, providing a generous amount of new public program for each. In times of large events, the buoyant and regularly dimensioned pontoons come back together to create a larger space.
Best Student Entry Title: Cemetery Team: Kevin Lang and Daniel Carlson This project reuses the pontoons to create a floating cemetery and park in Lake Washington; it is a place where loved ones can celebrate life in memory of the dead.
Honorable Mention Title: 88 Million Team: Jennifer Hohlbein, Joshua Lafreniere and Dan Blohowiak This project looks at the pontoons as an opportunity to remediate our growing concerns for the world’s energy crisis by turning the pontoons on their ends and inserting turbines into the pontoon’s exposed cavities to create tidal power.
Honorable Mention Title: Five Twenty Minus Five Team: Ostap Rudakevych, Masayuki Sono, Lapshan Fong and Yuko Sono This project proposes to play with the buoyancy of the pontoons by submerging them five centimeters below the surface of the water, creating a walkway where people seeming walk on water.
Honorable Mention Title: The Floating Memorial Team: Soo Bum You and Bongjai Shin The purpose of this project is to celebrate the original 520 bridge. The design is very sculptural, turning the old pontoons into an historical relic.
Honorable Mention Title: Skip Water Taxi Team: Graypants Team The existing bridge is broken apart and reassembled into SKIP, Seattle’s new water taxi system. Each pontoon is anchored to the shore of water-edge parks and neighborhoods to increase public access to the water and create docks for the water taxi to approach.
Honorable Mention Title: Evergreen Point Floating Farm Team: Andrew Bruno This project creates a large urban farm; it combines conventional surface farming with high-tech greenhouse farming to produce food year-round. It also includes a farmer’s market, apple orchard and an event space.
