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I thought we could take another look at Stonecutters Bridge as long as we're in Hong Kong. It was being built when I visited and it opened for traffic on December 20, 2009.
This structure originated from a design competition won by bridge architect Dissing+Wetling and developed by Ove Arup.
The towers are made of reinforced concrete that was topped in stainless steel. Each cable had its own drum which was rolled onto the deck, attached to roller skates, and then lifted into the tower anchorages with a crane. After each main deck section was lifted up and attached to the precut cables a heavier back span segment was lifted into place to balance it.
Note the rack and pinion elevator to carry workers up and down the 960 ft tall towers. In the Google Earth photo (below) we can see the many different bridges carrying vehicles to and from Tsing Yi Island. Stonecutters Bridge is at the lower right end of the island. The Google Earth photo is from 2009 and so you can see a gap in the center of the bridge before the last piece was put in place.  |
Cable-Stayed Bridges - Stonecutter's Bridge (2) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Nice photo!
ReplyDeleteThe authorship of the design is not quite so simple, there was some controversy - see http://www.nce.co.uk/debate-design-competitions/810670.article.
The competition was won by Flint and Neill, Shanghai Municipal Engineering Design Institute and Halcrow (engineers) with Dissing + Weitling (architects). Nonetheless, the client awarded the design contract to Arup and Cowi.
Ironically, F&N were bought out by Cowi at the end of 2008.