“Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. 'But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks. 'The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,' Marco answers, 'but by the line of the arch that they form.' Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: 'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.' Polo answers: 'Without stones, there is no arch.”

Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities (1972)

(A bridge is) not truly a bridge while men do not cross it.

A bridge is a man crossing a bridge.

Julio Cortázar, A Manual for Manuel (1973)

“Bridge-Building: efforts to establish communications and friendly contacts between people in order to make them friends or allies .”

Collins English Dictionary (2018)

ridges have been historically more than mere infrastructures. They represent the first assumption of cities as diverse places where different kinds of mobility delineate different kinds of people. These mobilities intertwine adding complexity to the urban experience, creating unique human and spatial interactions. In contemporary cities, multimodal mobility has expanded and is continually represented by the interference of pedestrian paths, roads, rail and subways tracks, and lines of airplanes crossing our skies. The city has progressively become a series of hubs where different kinds of human beings connect through different modes of mobility.

Italo Calvino poetically explains that a bridge is defined by the controversy between the autonomy of its different parts and the overall strategy that organizes these parts into a whole. This idea of a reciprocal connection between the parts and the whole is one of the deepest characteristics of architecture. In architecture, addition is not just a sum of parts but a synergetic cooperation between them in the search of a much broader aim. In the case of bridges, this cooperation becomes vital in various conditions. Firstly, bridges are singular structures where every part has an essential role in the functioning of the whole. Secondly, bridges provide a special human experience based on the idea of conquering the other side. As Cortazar reminds us, a bridge’s idiosyncrasy is based on the fact of the person crossing it, a singular circumstance of inhabitation that is concretized through the defeat of reaching the other side. Lastly, bridges are socially motivated through the desire of interconnecting communities and extending neighborhoods in more effective ways. In the English dictionary, the composed word bridge-building means “the efforts to establish communications and friendly contacts between people in order to make them friends or allies”.

In this syllabus, bridge-building should be understood as a bridge that exceeds the practical engineering fact of overcoming the crossing, becoming a more spatial and social experience related to the poetics of architecture. Bridge-building should be able to incorporate an architectural program and a specific reflection about the space that it contains. The Tower Bridge in London, the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, or the Ponte Rialto in Venice, are examples of how the engineering of bridges is extended into architecture. The architecture of bridge-building is materialized through the continuation of the city’s fabric, reinforcing a connection between the two sides. The street is extended over the water through the inclusion of functional programs, for example, cultural, commercial, residential or leisure. Unrealized projects such as the Palazzo dei Congressi in Venice, designed by Louis Kahn in 1972, or Malevich’s Tektonik, which was Zaha Hadid’s graduation thesis project in 1976, are also interesting examples of bridge-building ambitions located in between engineering feats and architectural explorations. The Bridge-Park project in Washington D.C. by OMA+OLIN and the Bridge-Garden project by Thomas Heatherwick in London, both designed in 2014, display an attention to including new programmatic explorations in urban bridges.

Palazo dei Congresi, Venice, Italy by Louis Kahn, 1972

Malevich’s Tektonik, London, by Zaha Hadid, 1977

Bridge-building also represents a reflection on architecture’s symbolic imagery. The presence of bridges is significant in the construction of the identity of river cities, and bridge-buildings are an extreme case of these circumstances. The importance of a bridge-building’s image is due to its architectural features, such as volume and space. Hence, these buildings become extraordinary icons of the cities that contain them. Bridges and bridge-buildings represent a manifesto of the aesthetic aspirations of a community in one specific moment of its history. The reading of the sequence of bridges is a testimony to river cities’ multi-layered histories. Separated by a few hundred meters in Paris we can find two diverging bridges: the Pont Neuf, a robust presence built during the 17thC in Paris through the stress of religious wars, and the light and elegant structure of the Pont des Arts erected at the beginning of the 19thC in a Paris under the intellectual influence of the Age of Enlightenment.

Pont Neuf, Paris by Jean Baptiste Androuet du Cerceau, 1578

Ponts des Arts, Paris, by Louis Arretche, 1804

The necessity of accommodating different levels of crossing the city, the exploration of programmatic and spatial possibilities, and the significance of bridge building’s imagery are excellent topics for the examination of plans, sections and elevations as essential tools of architectural expression. The proximity of water also forces environmental reflection and landscape inclusion that is indispensable in the Chinese context.

We chose Shantang district as our site for two reasons. Firstly, its confluence of diverse networks such as streets, waterways, highways and subway systems, and secondly for its historical significance. Here we have two opportunities, one is to explore the complementarity of different urban webs and the second is the challenge of confronting our contemporary architecture with traditional ones. Working in China we must always be conscious of the dilemma between old and new that is affecting architectural thinking and practice.

The intensity of Chinese tradition has been reflected in the powerful character of its historic constructions, however contemporary architecture has not provided clear statements about how to respond to this heritage. Historic replicas and simulacra are common in contemporary Chinese architecture as a representative of this missing link. Although commercially very efficient, this illegitimate and disrespectful response to tradition must be culturally defeated, reinforcing a deeper discussion around tradition in Schools of Architecture. The work of a literate architect will provide a contemporary and respectful response to tradition for educating society. It is essential to be equally proud of our historic tradition and our contemporary condition.

Site, Context

We will work in the Shantang district in Suzhou, specifically the part of the district around Shantang River limited to the northwest by the highway (Ring Road), and to the southeast by the subway line 2 that runs under Guangji road. This piece of neighborhood is approximately one kilometer long.

The spine of the Shangtang district is Shangtang Street that runs parallel to the river, a historically important canal opened during the Tang dynasty (618-907 B.C.) to link the old town of Suzhou with the touristic Tiger Hill. The 1,200-year-old Shantang Street is on the list of China’s “National Historic and Cultural Streets”, and the whole area is under the Shantang “Historic-Cultural Protection Zone” inside the Master Plan of Suzhou.

The Shangtang street is now a place where local people cohabit with national and international groups of tourists looking for the architectural heritage and the feeling of old Suzhou street and water landscapes. The Shangtang river is no longer a place of intense life as depicted in the famous painting “Prosperous Suzhou” (Xu Yang, 1759), where houses and shops were mostly opened onto it. Nowadays most of the houses and commerce open onto the street with the river at the rear of urban life, converted into a picturesque waterway for tourist boats traveling to Tiger Hill. The lack of bridges contributes to this rear condition of the river and the understanding of the river as a gap in the city. The reinforcement of the connection of urban fabric, the reestablishment of the river as part of city life, and the potential derived from a stronger relationship with Shangtang street are some of the challenges that the site offers.

For the new bridge-building we will focus on a specific site on the Shantang river between two subsidiary canals. These two canals run perpendicular to the Shantang river. This site is in the core of the neighbourhood, where important pedestrian paths have lost the possibility of being connected across the river. This site is also close to the only historical bridge connecting both sides, allowing us to establish a discourse between traditional and contemporary architectures (see maps above).