Buendía Bridge
Record: 320 m
Main Span Record: 162 m
BRIDGE OVER BUENDIA RESERVOIR
Embalse de Buendía (Guadalajara) | 2005 – 2006
The bridge over the Buendía reservoir is a newly established infrastructure work that solves a serious communication problem between the Cuenca and Guadalajara provinces as a result of the construction of the reservoir, representing an urban and development brake for the entire Buendía region in an area of high ecological and landscape value.
The main concern of ESTUDIO AIA was to achieve an integrated work in a virgin area, in a natural environment of great beauty. The 162 m jump of the span over the Buendía reservoir is carried out with an elegant, transparent bridge, subtly integrated into the environment in a perfect symbiosis between nature and technique. The Buendía Bridge is the only bridge in Spain where a metal latticework structure curves in plan and elevation, which, inspired on the past metal culture of the 19th century, reinterprets it in the 21st century.
The Buendía bridge is an example of a conjunction between the environment and civil engineering, an example of sustainable development, where it is not only intended to provide a functional response to the crossing over the reservoir and the promotion of an entire region but that the work is itself beautiful, collaborating to create a landscape, where the user feels that false sense of mastery nature. A bridge that located in front of it, on the banks of the reservoir, transmits peace and harmony. It is not a question of building on a site, but of building the site so that this is qualified and imbued with the work. The place before the work is beautiful. Once the bridge is built, it is also unique.
A composite solution made with two parabolic metal lattices has been designed, with an upper concrete slab constituting the deck and a lower concrete slab in the support area. The depth varies from 4.00 m in the centre of the span and abutments up to 9.50 m on piers. The total length of the bridge is 315.00 m in three spans of 58.50 162.00 94.50 m.
The bridge has been built using the cantilevered advance technique with metal segments placed directly by a crane that was placed on both banks of the Buendía reservoir, the lateral sections were arranged in one piece, while the central section of 162 m span was divided into five segments, cantilevered until the central segment was arranged in the key of the bridge.
Wikipedia
