This years footbridge conference in Madrid is the continuation of a long set of Conferences that started in Paris in 2002, followed by cities as Porto, Venice, Wroclaw, London and Berlin. The present edition tries to follow the aim of the Berlin’s 2017 conference. In that case the moto of the congress was ‘tell us a story’; now we want to know more about the feeling and experience of users, owners, designers and constructors.
Being part of the just ongoing garden exhibition in Ingolstadt, Germany, a new footbridge leads across an arterial road to the main entrance of the new park. Crossing the bridge and approaching the park, visitors can experience the gardens already from the distance. Pedestrian bridges are walked, experienced and touched by people, so they have to find the right language and scale – and they have to reflect and respect the context and the place where they are built. The design for the Pius Bridge in Ingolstadt takes this intrinsic requirement into account by clearly reducing it to the basic function of a bridge: to provide users with a direct route connection! In addition, the design aimsto give the place and itself an individual and identity-creating character through a concise structure and well thought-out details. However, the bridge as a whole is much more than the sum of its formal components: it not only connects two places, but it also combines function, form, structure and lighting to form a holistic ensemble that fits naturally into the urban context, perception and everyday life of people.