The „Water Lilie’s Bridge“ is a pedestrian and bicyclers bridge over a secondary arm of the river Danube, connecting the centre of the small Austrian town Tulln, with a new garden exhibition built in a romantic forest and meadows area, and also with the Harbour on the main Danube stream.

With our project for the bridge we did not intend to search for the most direct and shortest connection between the destinations but we wanted to make the way over the water to be most pleasant and to give the passer-by the possibility to enjoy the beautiful nature of the water park.

Inspired by the form of the water lily plants, we designed round columns of prefabricated concrete as joints between the straight steel connecting girders, covered with wooden floor. This “metabolistic” art of construction gave the possibilities to change the directions of the way and to make the bridge like a light spider net over the Water. The round platforms are rest places and view points.

As the levels of the goal points have about 3 meters difference in the height, for the comfort of the pedestrians and the bicyclers, we did not want to make the bridge inclined only in one direction on this long distance of 140 m.
We made each of the connecting parts to go at first light up (with 1 % inclination) and after small horizontal part to go down (with 6 % inclination). This makes the way in both directions comfortable and creates on the whole length of the bridge a pleasant wavelike movement. The up and down way on each straight part corresponds to the needs of the steel construction to be higher in the midpoint.

During the night the bridge is illuminated with LED-s, hidden in the handrail of the parapets which gives bizarre white light over the romantic environment.

The architects Aneta Bulant and Klaus Wailzer