Portland, Oregon-based designer Volkan Alkanoglu has installed a new timber and steel pedestrian bridge to showcase the “Plug-and-play urbanism” design strategy that is emerging behind the help of new technologies. The prefabricated off-site and installed in only a few hours, Noah’s Ark-like structure was commissioned by the city’s Public Art program to span an 80-foot-wide culvert in the South Hills neighborhood south of downtown.
The design is meant to resemble driftwood that collects in the creek area, which is also defined by mid-century modern ranch homes that Alkanoglu drew on for an additional reference.
Per the architect: “While Alkanoglu originally envisioned fabricating the bridge solely from cross-laminated timber, budgetary constraints encouraged a different but equally innovative strategy. Taking a cue from shipbuilding techniques, he and a team of engineers began with a steel armature, but veered away from tradition by cladding it with CNC-cut and flip-milled timber planks—a product of computational design. In this way, each plank is custom cut, then stack-laminated into one large, volumetric, undulating form.”
The techniques used agreed with Alkanoglu’s intentions toward sustainability as well as highlighting the benefits of the Plug-and-play method in creating a more efficient design process.
“In this way, the bridge could be fabricated off-site, transported to the location by any oversize truck as one piece, and lifted into place with a crane,” he said. “Our cities urgently need upgrades on all levels, and plug-and-play urbanism is an economically feasible way to produce mid-scale infrastructure offsite and deliver it to its urban context. We can leverage advancements in computational design to be efficient and innovative.”
In total, the project cost $375,000. A full gallery of installation images can be viewed below.
5 Comments
Wow, Archinect - do you need a copy editor? I'm available starting at $50/ hour.
Pretty sure Jennifer Bonner took the photos, but whoever "Jennifer Boomer" is I hope I never meet them.
http://www.jenniferboomer.com/about
Hope you can get some ointment for that burn archanonymous
haha - I stand corrected!
Here, Volkan Alkanoglu talks about his work.
https://archinect.com/features...
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