"The shortlist for London’s newest bridge was revealed on Tuesday, four elegant designs that would link burgeoning Nine Elms to Pimlico on the north bank of the Thames.
Only a few years ago there would have seemed little need to connect a site — defined by the Royal Mail’s South London sorting office and the New Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market — to a pedestrian and cycle bridge: the only traffic was trucks.
But now Nine Elms in being billed by Wandsworth council as ‘The greatest transformational story at the heart of the world’s greatest city’. Which might be overstating the case a little.
What is certain though is that the huge cube of the new US Embassy in Nine Elms — a super-fortified structure with London’s first moat in almost a millennium — will generate traffic and interest, and the ill-planned housing blocks under construction on the south bank will need some kind of connection to the city.
The four shortlisted designs are all elegant and restrained, chosen from a long list that contained some wackily imaginative and occasionally enjoyably absurd designs including one with a waterfall and another conceived as a huge greenhouse.
BuroHappold with Marks Barfield Architects present a single pair of twin, subtly inclined pylons supporting a slender bridge.
Bistro, with Robin Snell and Partners’ design, is depicted in a kind of misty Whistler Thames nocturne, but it too features two toothpick pylons and elegantly spiralled access ramps, a subtle nod to the influence of Foster and Partners’ Millau Viaduct in France.
London Garden Bridge faces thorny patch as critics step up attack
Garden Bridge
The Garden Bridge, billed as a horticultural oasis in the heart of London, can boast Boris Johnson, the city’s mayor, the architect Lord Rogers and the actress Joanna Lumley among its many high-profile backers. The trust running the project has already chosen the architect, designer, engineers and construction groups, and says the bridge will be ready to welcome its first visitors in June 2018. Recently, however, the £175m project has started to look like it could be under threat.
Continue reading
Ove Arup with AL_A Architects and Gross Max’s design envisages an arcing parabolic arch and a sinuous pair of winding approaches.
Finally, Ove Arup again, this time with Hopkins Architects and Grant Associates, show a pair of red-painted slender cigar-shaped pylons evocative of the Festival of Britain Skyline from 1951 and, in between, a similarly snaking set of S curves.
The elaborateness and length of the approaches in all the designs is dictated by the need for the bridge to provide clear height above the river for boats to pass under and to give the gentle gradient required for bikes.
The comparison will inevitably be made with the controversial designs for the Garden Bridge downstream.
These proposals make Thomas Heatherwick’s fungal design look lumpy and intrusive and, in contrast to the private trust mooted to run the Garden Bridge, the Nine Elms crossing will be a genuinely public building. It will be open and accessible 24 hours a day — albeit only £24m of the suggested £40m budget has so far been allocated from community infrastructure levies, leaving the possibility that the bridge could be ‘branded’ by private sponsors in some unappealing way.
But, like the Garden Bridge, there is some opposition here too — with both council and residents on the Westminster side objecting to the loss of green space and additional traffic — alongside complaints that it is only 300m from an existing bridge.
There are also questions about how exactly the new bridge will abut the US Embassy with its fearsome 30m bomb blast zone and paranoid security infrastructure. The four teams will now be given time to work up their designs further."
Fonte: Business & Economy
