Living Bridge

Hamburg, one of the world’s least densified big cities, is discovering its waterfronts. The potential within the multiply divided zone in this section of the Elbe River appears to be inexhaustible: As a comparison, the most coveted areas in Hamburg between the Elbvororten, well-to-do suburbs to the west near the river, the Stadtpark, a city park to the north, and the commercial/residential City-Süd sector in the southern part of the city could be doubled when placed to the south of the Elbe. 

Wilhelmsburg, the city’s largest borough when measured according to surface area, the largest river island in Europe, the island to which Napoleon crossed in 1814 via a 4-kilometre wooden bridge, lies in the heart of the city. That is, once the ‘hurdle’ of linking it up via a new bridge has been ‘cleared’. Hamburg’s “Wasserstadt”, the land masses lying directly on the water – 40% of which are still occupied by the port proper to this day – provide the best prerequisites for kilometres of appealing and specifically waterfront sites; as close as Ottensen, a popular, thriving quarter only a short ride away from the inner city. To date merely 2.7% of Hamburg’s inhabitants live on 4.6% of its greater metropolitan area.

Even without hosting the Olympics in 2012, the Hamburg Senate wants to take advantage of the existing spirit of optimism that awards its former hinterlands second place in the tourism rankings and use this to increase their power of attraction by taking the leap across the Elbe; not least of all with the help of the International Garden Show and an International Building Exhibition in 2013. 

Adolf Max Vogt, a Swiss art and architecture critic, saw the essential virtue of cities lying on the water in being able to use the water to gain space and breathing room for critical introspection and self-reflection. To leapfrog the Elbe using qualities borrowed from the inner city in order to nullify the division into the so-called “City” on the one side and the “Hafen”, the port on the other, – a policy practised for over 100 years – dramatically alters the Hanseatic townscape. The view of Hamburg’s skyline can still be found, the opportunity to be able to grow on this kind of scale in the midst of town is incomparable. The proposed LIVING BRIDGE, a multistoried bridge complex 700 metres long across the northern Norderelbe distributary, combines the necessary roadway bridge with a green park axis and affordable housing space on property lots that don’t really exist in the first place.