WilkinsonEyre wins at the International Architecture & Design Awards

We collaborated closely with engineer Cundall to produce both designs that won in the Bridge Concept category.

The gold winner Dongguan Cross Taiping Waterway Bridge is a new motorway, planned to be a world-class landmark in Binhaiwan New District, that celebrates both the link between the city, the waterfront and its landscape.

The cross-sectional design reshapes multi-modal travel and considers the needs of pedestrians, bicycles, public transportation, and cars, as well as the functional aspect of transport, life, landscape, and ecology.

The bridge proposal also carefully considered context including nearby landmark bridges. The design team paid careful attention to both highlighting the bridge itself, and how the design would integrate with the overall surroundings and the city skyline.

The bronze-winning Jinhua Hepan Bridge is a new iconic motorway across the Jinhua River in Zhejiang Province to meet the needs of Jinhua City’s growing economy and population. The final structural design incorporates prestressed cables, presenting a complex interplay of forces at work. The Jinhua Hepan bridge takes this complexity one step further with its feature slender and split pylon.

Pedestrians are safely separated from motor vehicles via strategically positioned cables which are inset from the deck edge. The cable placement reduces angles between the pylon and cables, subsequently decreasing the bending-induced stress in the pylon and deck and allowing for smaller cross-sections and a lighter, elegant, slender-looking bridge.