The Curling Bridge (taste, affordance and meaning aspects)
Elenaz Anzalimojarad
The curling - or rolling – bridge
Location: Grand Union Canal in Paddington Basin, London Created by: Thomas Heatherwick
At first sight it looks just like any other normal bridge and the minimal design could be looked even simple and boring . But once a week Rolling Bridge closes and opens by slowly and smoothly curling until it transforms from a conventional, straight bridge, into a circular sculpture which sits on the bank of the canal.
This design can mostly considered through taste aspect, which was based on the opportunity for aesthetic experience. The bridge makes the movement which is the effective, extraordinary, unexpected – and beautiful aspect of the bridge in compression with the other bridges which surprised their visitors and give them a new experience.
At the same time it is a combination of mechanical and artistic elements together, the horizontal form of the bridge provides a simple usage as a passageway but the entirely curled form acts like a sculpture so it can find another function for the environment around.
by the way from affordance aspect maybe it can’t be mark able too much. This bridge represents an experimental gesture, and it's really complicated for what it does , because the bridge spends the week looking like any other conventional bridges ,in fact what people are facing to is not a innovative design. So it has hardly any practical use.
As a conceptual view, the closed form contains the freewheeling and it still retains a sense of potential, like a muscle tensed and ready to flex and an impish desire to upend conventional thinking, from this part of view it gets more close to the meaning aspect and gets more related to the culture, meaning and interpretation of an octagonal roll to open and then uncurls again.