Aiming to recover the presence of the river Haihe as it flows through the center of the city of Tianjin, a series of bridges shall be built to allow the circulation of traffic and pedestrians from one shore to the other. For this reason, instead of hovering over the fluvial bed, the new Bengbu Bridge is anchored to both shores, establishing an organic continuity with the river banks. In the form of slender metal arthropods, two light and asymmetrically placed catwalks are added to the central highway allowing pedestrians to cross the river at a different level than the road traffic, and generating alternative itineraries. In spite of its geometric complexity and thanks to computer-aided design, the resulting structure is light and simple. A single support buried inside the river bed is enough to span the distance between the shore and the central part of the highway.

The three-dimensional grid, lit up from within the metallic tubular structure, is actually a volume, rather than a grid. The intensity and color of the illumination varies depending on the time of the year and the light of day, turning the bridge into a subtle landscape attraction, more related to the neighboring park than to the roads... [+]