Winning Prize for Guangzhou Bridge Upgrade Design
Guangzhou relies on the water structure of the Pearl River Delta. The bridges in Guangzhou are the most important features for the connectivity through the city. In the beginning of the 80's Guangzhou was a bike-able city, during the 90's the car became much more important and most infrastructures were made to maximize the comfort of the car traffic.
Today many cities are trying to become sustainable and encouraging people to use a bike instead of a car. Only the infrastructure is more car-based than bike-friendly, including for the Guangzhou Bridge. Because of this reason OBERMEYER proposes to transform the Guangzhou Bridge into the first bike friendly bridge of Guangzhou.
Resembling the shape of Chinese character "龙", we extend on the east side of the existing bridge and create a new slow-traffic connection. This connection gets a separated construction to avoid conflict with the realization of the existing bridge. At the same time this connection gets protected from sound and air pollution of the car traffic. Our goal is to create a new icon for Guangzhou not only from the visual point of view, with this new bridge the example for the future sustainable development of the city will be set.