The fastest way to get from any point A to any point B is through a straight line – but when your point A is on a mountain, and your point B is on another mountain, that’s pretty hard to work out. According to architect Arturo Tedeschi (A>T), that’s also boring, so they came up with a better idea.
Their inspiration came from visionary Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto – he designed the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013, a strangely beautiful construction.
“The Pavilion is a delicate, three-dimensional structure”, he explains, “each unit of which is composed of fine steel bars. It forms a semi-transparent, irregular ring, simultaneously protecting visitors from the elements while allowing them to remain part of the landscape. The overall footprint will be 350 square-metres and the Pavilion has two entrances. A series of stepped terraces will provide seating areas that will allow the Pavilion to be used as a flexible, multi-purpose social space. The delicate quality of the structure, enhanced by its semi-transparency, will create a geometric, cloud-like form, as if it were mist rising from the undulations of the park. From certain vantage points, the Pavilion will appear to merge with the classical structure of the Serpentine Gallery, with visitors suspended in space.”
The CloudBridge follows the same design principles as the Serpentine gallery pavilion: it is constructed based on a fixed algorithm, and it strives to to heighten the experience of footbridges by creating a non-linear path that slows users down and connects them with the surrounding nature. But what really gets me, what really makes me like this bridge is that it’s easy on the eye. Usually, the problem with man-made structures in natural environments such as this one is that they look really bad. Some parts of the world should be left untouched!
But if you are going to build something in a pristine area… something like this doesn’t seem that bad. Made from cubic steel modular frame and supported by a main beam, this design is fairly simple as well, which means it could be built in virtually all mountain ranges.
However, it seems to me that this is a really niched and limited option – it’s a fairly big investment, so it should only be built in areas with lots of visitors, but then again, it’s only suitable for very high mountain ranges – which usually don’t have lots of visitors. So what do you do think, what’s your opinion on the Cloud Bridge?
