November 21, 2007

Pedestrian bridge meant as icon for flight museum

Rendering by Royce Bixby, SRG Partnership [enlarge]

SRG Partnership is designing a new pedestrian bridge for the Museum of Flight in Seattle to connect the museum's main campus with large aircraft exhibits across a busy arterial street. Pedestrians now make that crossing at street level.

Sellen Construction is general contractor and Seneca Real Estate Group is project manager.

The bridge is designed to help attract people to the museum by capturing the power and movement of flight. It will link to future construction across the street that could include additional galleries and other buildings, said Rick Zieve, SRG's principal in charge on the project .

“(The museum) felt that the bridge could become an important icon,” Zieve said. “There was interest in creating a cross-section of the bridge as a fuselage or something that was out of the ordinary.”

The design is a truss of crossing circular steel pipe sections surrounding an inner glass and acrylic enclosure. Pure radius bent pipes were leaned at 45 degree angles to intersect and then the intersections were welded to make the circular truss, Zieve said.

“With pure circles leaned over, it looks like ovals,” Zieve said. “It felt much more aeronautical and much more like a fuselage.”

The bridge is 10 feet wide at the ends but will expand to 15 feet wide in the center, encouraging people to stop in the center and enjoy views of Mount Rainier.

The floor was also designed to be a point of interest, made of a lightweight extruded aluminum channeled material. The bridge has a transparent acrylic roof and a glass wall on the south for wind protection. A glass handrail will run through it.

The estimated construction cost is $6 million, Zieve said.

Construction should be complete by August of 2008, when the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels use the museum as a base when they fly over Seattle during Seafair.

The museum is one of the largest air and space museums in the world, attracting more than 400,000 visitors each year.

Also on the SRG design team were Tim Richey and Yumiko Fujimori. The structural and civil engineer is Magnusson Klemencic Associates and Geo Engineers is geotechnical engineer. Traffic signal design is being done by TraffEX and the lighting consultant is Cierra Lighting Group.