Pedestrian Bridge Design

2020

Location: Cairo, Egypt

Phase: Concept

As designers of none Egyptian, when we got the design proposition, the only thing we know about Egypt is Pyramid and Sphinx. When we investigate Egypt’s contemporary history, we realized there is an extremely complicated background before it moves into the era of development. However, the complication of the history of Egypt resolved a uniquely urban life on this land. The modern economy, religion composition, and ancient structures form a unique atmosphere; the mechanism to find the symbolic cultural representation is hard to approach.

Building a pedestrian bridge on the Nile river at the center city of Cairo is an opportunity for acculturation interpretation under the urban space organization’s sequences. Neither the Pyramid nor Minaret could articulate a complex culture symbol of Cairo. Instead, we are exploring a way to return to the original nature of Egypt. Rather than dig into the black hole, catalog and describe the complicated culture itself, we propose to use the ordinary nature landscape of Egypt as the media to coordinate this cultural problem. We claim that this layer of the coordination could construct the linkage between each fragment of this particular culture and the collective consciousness of citizens. It will allow visitors and residences to perceive the interaction between the natural landscape and cultural landscape in the center of the city; it creates the condition to generate the symbolic cultural representation.

This bridge will be built like an emerald necklace laying on the Nile, become the horizontal landmark of Cairo, and blur itself into the local lifestyle. A local botanical garden has been set up at the top of the water surface, as the central node of the design advocates the vision of the central oasis. Base on that, we generate precise geometry of the bridge body from the traffic node on each side of the bank, entwine with the center oasis area three-dimensionally. For the top surface of the bridge body, we use a computational method to simulate a rough texture and topographic of white desert surround city, functionally as the sun shading device, and provide infrastructure for the retail space. The bridge function extended to recreation route, ground sales, teahouses, even for goat habitat from the botanical garden. The composition of construction articulates an irregular surface and smooth panel together, fantastically, an evolution from the natural landscape to the cultural landscape.