Beyond the Structure; Footbridge as a Landscape Architectural Design Product

Abstract

Footbridge, by its name, proclaims that it is a special urban access medium for pedestrians. Unfortunately, there are less works that through research highlight this fact. Generally, pedestrian bridges are taken into account not enough differently than the `classical` bridge1 itself. There are many scientific works focusing on the structural properties of footbridges rather than on its architectural and urban values. This study aims to scrutinize the architectural and urban added values of the footbridge to its context and human life. It will be taken into consideration in this study as an urban furniture, a public space, a pathway, a landmark as well as a landscape feature. The goal of this research hides behind concerning with the user density rather than load bearing capacity, the urban aesthetics rather than large spans, the accessibility rather than constructability. A selection of ten pedestrian bridges will be the raw input of this research. The selection criteria of these ten projects can be listed as follows; being built, being a recent project- due to the availability of one of the research tools of this study- [within 10 years], being of an urban context and over passing a waterway rather than a motorway. Geography has been intentionally kept wide so that to have cases from different cultures as well. Apart from general information about the cases, this study will try to highlight the architectural and urban added values of each project to its context by various methods. Some qualitative values of an architectural and urban character of the current state of each project will be evaluated by professionals through Likert scale method. These people will be provided enough written and visual material about each case so that a rational evaluation process can be achieved. Another special method is used to highlight the added values of each footbridge to its neighborhood. Google earth Timeline plugin will be a crucial application to assist us on that. By contrasting and comparing two satellite images of the zone representing its state before and after the construction of the project we may read those values more clearly.