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05 NOVEMBER 13 by OLIVIA SOLON
Architectural firm Next has been awarded first prize in a competition to design a bridge to span a river within the town of Meixi Lake in China, for its Möbius strip inspired design.
Meixi Lake -- next to Changsha in the Hunan province -- is an experiment in urban planning. The 6.5 million square metre city development has been designed from scratch by architectural firm Kohn Pederson Fox Associates and centres around a manmade lake.
Within Meixi is found an area called Dragon King Harbour River. It is here where Next's bridge will be built. The pedestrian bridge is 150 metres across and 24 metres high, spanning the river via a number of different spaghetti-esque pathways at different heights.
"The construction with the intersecting connections is based on the principal of the Möbius ring," explains architect Michel Schreinemachers.
"On the other hand it refers to a Chinese knot that comes from an ancient decorative Chinese folk art," adds colleague John van de Water.
Next Architects
The bridge will be made out of steel and echoes a number of works that Next has already built. Earlier this year, the team built The Impossible Stair, a circular stair sculpture that is also inspired by the Mobius strip. Similarly, Next also created a bridge in the northern part of Amsterdam with two intertwined pathways, separating bicycle and pedestrian traffic.
For the Changsha bridge, Next proposed a structure made out of a corroded steel, which has a reddish colour. The brief was quite specific about the number of layers required of the bridge. "The pathway had to connect on either side of the river, two roads on either side and to two higher locations (a small hill on one side and a sports park on the other)," explained Next co-founder Bart Reuser.
"Now we've been chosen it will be a big challenge to keep the design alive the way it is," adds Reuser, "but the prospects are pretty good."
He said that it can sometimes be hard designing a structure for a city being built from scratch. "It happens in China a lot. Often you are invited to look at the location and there's nothing there. There might be a house or a road, but they tell you 'you can take that away'. So you return to the office with a blank sheet."
However, in the case of Meixi Lake there was already a masterplan and "the profile was more or less recognisable."
Reuser hopes that the bridge is used by lots of people, "otherwise it's quite a large structure for nobody using it".
Architectural firm Next has been awarded first prize in a competition to design a bridge to span a river within the town of Meixi Lake in China, for its Möbius strip inspired design.
Meixi Lake -- next to Changsha in the Hunan province -- is an experiment in urban planning. The 6.5 million square metre city development has been designed from scratch by architectural firm Kohn Pederson Fox Associates and centres around a manmade lake.
Within Meixi is found an area called Dragon King Harbour River. It is here where Next's bridge will be built. The pedestrian bridge is 150 metres across and 24 metres high, spanning the river via a number of different spaghetti-esque pathways at different heights.
"The construction with the intersecting connections is based on the principal of the Möbius ring," explains architect Michel Schreinemachers.
"On the other hand it refers to a Chinese knot that comes from an ancient decorative Chinese folk art," adds colleague John van de Water.
Next Architects
The bridge will be made out of steel and echoes a number of works that Next has already built. Earlier this year, the team built The Impossible Stair, a circular stair sculpture that is also inspired by the Mobius strip. Similarly, Next also created a bridge in the northern part of Amsterdam with two intertwined pathways, separating bicycle and pedestrian traffic.
For the Changsha bridge, Next proposed a structure made out of a corroded steel, which has a reddish colour. The brief was quite specific about the number of layers required of the bridge. "The pathway had to connect on either side of the river, two roads on either side and to two higher locations (a small hill on one side and a sports park on the other)," explained Next co-founder Bart Reuser.
"Now we've been chosen it will be a big challenge to keep the design alive the way it is," adds Reuser, "but the prospects are pretty good."
He said that it can sometimes be hard designing a structure for a city being built from scratch. "It happens in China a lot. Often you are invited to look at the location and there's nothing there. There might be a house or a road, but they tell you 'you can take that away'. So you return to the office with a blank sheet."
However, in the case of Meixi Lake there was already a masterplan and "the profile was more or less recognisable."
Reuser hopes that the bridge is used by lots of people, "otherwise it's quite a large structure for nobody using it".
