Zaha Hadid’s Bridge

Zaha Hadid has created a spectacular pedestrian bridge across the River Ebro at Zaragoza for a festival in Spain. Dezeen features some great shots by Luke Hayes. In the Arts & Architecture blog in the Guardian Jonathan Glancey says that it could point to the future of bridges within cities:

It shows what sort of imaginative bridges we might yet have in cities around the world and it might just encourage an intelligent development of the river banks on either side of it. One of the great things about this enclosed structure - made largely of concrete, steel trusses and glass reinforced concrete cladding - is that offers a walk across the wide river in the shade. It might have rained heavily in Zaragoza recently, causing the Ebro to flood, but for much of the year, this is a blazingly hot city and Hadid’s parasol across the water seems heaven sent.

If the twin-span exterior of the bridge is spectacular, its interior is intriguing; it offers not just a curving walk across the Ebro, but a pair of exhibition halls. In the future, these might be used for any number of purposes, although there is a fear, expressed locally, that given its remote location, the bridge might become the haunt of thugs, ne’er-do-wells and weirdos as well as that of innocent walkers and the inevitable skateboarders.

Zaha Hadid Architects
Zaragoza Expo 2008