Ambitious, fascinating suspension bridge to be built for 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics

Architects and engineers from Beijing and Vienna have teamed up to undertake an ambitious project of designing a suspension bridge that will span across the Gui River connecting Beijing city center to Zhangjiakou, North China’s Hebei. What’s more, this awesome bridge is specifically built for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

The bridge, named San Shan Bridge, is a project of Beijing and Vienna based architecture studio Penda. The inspiration is a combination of the Olympic symbol and its five rings, the landscape of mountains and valleys, and the structural resemblance of the bridge to the shape of a DNA.

Visitors will experience different perspectives of the bridge depending on where they stand. The main structure of the bridge is conceived as a series of the Olympic rings, which connect at their highest and lowest points.

Chirs Precht, co-founder of Penda says it is helpful to view the apparatus in a similar way as a bicycle wheel. There are 300-foot tall steel rings tilt toward each other in pairs, and the deck and cables are the hub and spokes of the wheel, respectively. Moreover, the structure aims to provide a public space, with transportation lanes and the pedestrian lanes seperated by a natural stripe of hedges and trees.