Animal Influence I - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Kelty McKinnon
Zwarts and Jansma, and OKRA’s Landshape, competition finalist
times the width, and half the cost of Banff’s
celebrated wildlife bridges. Its width
accommodates the movement of animals in
herds, rather than individually. The scheme, titled
“Hyper Nature”, responds to projected shifts in
climate pattern and subsequent shifting migration
routes through a modular design that is
engineered to be placed with a single crane and
to span the highway without a central column.
This means a flexible, movable system that can
be implemented without shutting traffic down to
both lanes on the busy Interstate. This wider span
is able to accommodate…
a great diversity of habitats on top of
the bridge, as well as a wide range
of migrational corridors. Multiple
habitats, including a scree seam,
forest, shrub edge and open
meadow, are distilled and
condensed into a series of parallel
bands that act as crossing corridors
for various species. The wide
foraging bands provide an open
field of view, while narrow forest and
shrub bands provide enclosure and
camouflage corridors. (9)
Using a modular, replicable construction method,
the bridge can be reproduced simply and
cheaply.
The bridge is engineered to have a
single span across the highway with
no center pier, unlike standard
bridge design, which requires three
structural elements: the abutment,
beam and deck slab.
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The hypar-vault system merges these
three elements into one through
preformed formwork. Without a
central column, the bridge can be
built without closing the highway in
both directions. Placement is
designed to rely mostly on fill
materials, rather than needing to cut
into existing grades.
.
The ARC Competition indeed signals a paradigm
shift in the way large infrastructural projects are
managed. But there are still fundamental
blockages to taking an ecosystems approach to
complex infrastructure projects. Unlike Europe,
whose centralized national and international
planning structures support comprehensive road
ecology projects, North American projects often
involve multiple jurisdictions that compete for
funding, lack open communication, and have
differing political objectives (10). For this reason it
is very difficult to build support and achieve
consensus, let alone find the funds.
Other Efforts
Several European countries require an intensive
and interdisciplinary highway design process that
integrates environmental factors in the earliest
phases of project design. At the Rijkswaterstaat in
the Netherlands, for example, engineers,
landscape architects, policymakers and
ecologists work in the same office “to create
elegant hybrids of natural and engineered
systems”. (4) The Netherlands has built more than
600 ecoducts as part of a National Ecological
Network.