Client: UK Rail

Location: mostly urban context UK railway stations

Design: competition

Design Stage: conceptual scheme

Design team: Jing Wu, Jason Norris, Ovidija Zemaityte, Danyal Raza,

Victoria time lattice–truss iron railway foot-bridges have been under constant envolution in recent decades, with various modern measures such as materials’ upgrading, simplification, standardisation and prefabrication. However, it is still common that the bridge design is mainly engineering-driven and yet to benefit from contemporary industrial/architectural design. Most built examples still involve considerable amount of supporting structures landing on the railway/station platform,while the visual effects of lift shaft/tower, stair, bridge and canopies are often Not synchronized enough to become One language.  Therefore a more systematic approach is expected for delivering state-of-art footbridge product lines.

This conceptual design is proposing:

• Only reinforced concrete foundation/shell wall will touch on the platform, leaving the space in between the structures available for other amenities, such as kiosk, vending machines, bike storage, sitting bench etc;
• Most structural and cladding component can be prefabricated and modulised;
• Depending on specific site context, two or more structural adaptors/inserts (bespoke connecting wedges) will be needed to allow the standard package also adaptive to negotiating various types of site context;
• main body of the bridge to use reinforced double-wall slim shell  structure to reduce the vertical sizes and overall weight;
• An unified massing cladded by corten steel, over the stairs, bridge and lift shaft to achieve a contemporary appearance;
• A roof/canopy system integrated with the overall massing and material language can be added to the basic package, and can be installed in later stages;
• Other Integrating measures such as concealed LED lighting (eg integrated with handrails and cladding gaps), cladding integrated railway signages etc.