Specialist know-how: Principles for Designing Pedestrian Bridges
With their spectacular structures, pedestrian bridges became established in the past decades as an independent category of bridge building. Erected at the most diverse locations they surprise viewers with their special constructions, exciting pathways, and highly welcoming character. For structural engineers, they comprise an interesting and appealing field of expertise. Each pedestrian bridge has the primary task of safely guiding people across obstacles. Different than road or railway bridges, they don't simply connect two places by the shortest possible route. The challenge is to create a design that observers consider an adequate and logical example of construction and form. Dealing with the design of pedestrian bridges almost inevitably leads to questions on which attributes actually characterize a good design. This topic has already been comprehensively discussed and analysed by other disciplines that deal with form and function of items of everyday use. The industrial designer Dieter Rams formulated his "10 theses for good product design" (p. 71 top). They can be applied to pedestrian bridges rather well - considering that they are also items of people's everyday use. The theses received a large amount of recognition and remain valid to this day. Based on these principles we will explain how our firm, schlaich bergermann und partner, interprets the requirements for designing pedestrian bridges and in follow creates and develops structural design concepts and projects.
