Form Follows Function? The Forum Footbridge in Barcelona

The Forum footbridge crosses the Besos Marina and is placed in a new area of the city of Barcelona, with a very high architectural character. This area was constructed for the celebration of the 2004 Culture Forum.

The Forum footbridge is conceived as a two-span (141.7 and 45.35 m) continuous truss beam consisting in two parallel trusses supported by an edge of the esplanade, a central pier architectonically related to a building of the port, and an extreme pier hidden inside a parking lot.

The idea which governs the design of the bridge is to combine aesthetics with structural behaviour (form follows function) in a way that every element of the bridge can be identified as a tension, or compression member and the level of load it is resisting by its form. The paper explains how this idea was implemented.