Pont Felip II-Bac de Roda Bridge

Pont Felip II-Bac de Roda Bridge
1986-1987
Presented by Micah Deitz

After regenerating the urban fabric of the city coinciding with Barcelona’s preparations for the candidature for the 1992 Olympic Games, the city started building bigger projects. It is said that the Bac de Roda Bridge was the starting point for all bigger inerventions. The steel and concrete bridge, with its twin, pristine white, inclined and split arches, helped to unite two working-class districts at the northern part of the city that were separated by train tracks. Still, what the City Council wanted was something more than just a bridge, they wanted a symbol or an icon of Barcelona. Calatrava, though he had never built a bridge before, was chosen for the new structure. People who know about bridges say that it is much more complex than what would have been necessary -like many other Calatrava bridges around the world- but the real purpose of the project, its social impact, succeeded and the bridge became an emblem of the pre-Olympic architecture of the city. It won the FAD Prize in 1987 in the category of Architecture (the first time an engineering work won this prize) and was a finalist for the I Mies van der Rohe Pavilion Award for European Architecture in 1988.