The Magic Carpet

Abstract

One of the most powerful designs to have emerged from the Wilkinson Eyre practice is a bridge in North-West Greece. The deck, carried simply on a slender curve of high tensile steel cables, conveys the road from cliff face to cliff face of the narrow cleft carved into the Pindos Mountains by the river Metsovitikos. On each side, the road is tunnelled into the rock and the cables are fixed directly to anchorages on the rock faces, so no supporting towers are needed. Working with Arup, the architects reduced the suspension bridge to its simplest possible form, a spare and elegant horizontal plane between the chasm walls—the archetypal magic carpet, flying in light and air between caverns in the cliffs.