Take a peek at Toronto's new pedestrian bridge
You’re part of the work. What is it and what is it intended to do here? Yeah, the the bridge is affectionately called the Equinox Bridge because one of the key components that we tried to do was to break from the city grid. Oftentimes when we’re building, we build buildings and infrastructure that’s aligned with this colonial structure that was based on something implied on the land. What we wanted to do was pull the design back and reference the natural systems around us. Understanding that this place, the Ashbridges Bay Area, the end of the dawn, it’s all extremely important from the indigenous point of view. It’s also important from a naturalization point of view. All of our relations live here and we wanted to start to acknowledge the natural systems over the human systems. I’m sure the name links to that. Why equinox? Well, the bridge is actually aligned to the equinox angle. So when you don’t really notice it because of the curve, but when you take a look at the kind of the axis of this bridge. You’ll see that it marks the the moments in time when the sun is equal with the night. What was the team hoping it would evoke in people when they come down here and see this when it’s built in 2026? Yeah, there’s a couple things. One, it’s meant to be an iconic kind of gateway, the connection between the city and Villiers Islands. So more urban and more naturalistic systems. We also wanted people to actually stop on the bridge. It’s not just a connector, it allows people to sit to think about facing either in towards the river or out towards the Bay. Really connecting with life, not just necessarily on land but also underwater. You know, this was a competition, a design competition. Can you tell me a little bit about the team’s reaction when they found out they had won the successful design here? Yeah, this design is extremely ambitious. It’s quite beautiful. It’s also quite simplistic in its nature, kind of this dual curve, this S curve that relate to each other from a structural point of view. It’s one of the key components when you’re working with a limited amount of funds, you know, 14,000,012 million may seem like a lot. But it’s not a lot in 2024. So one of the key components was to make sure that you know you’re doing something that’s iconic, but then also, you know, making sure that it’s actually feasible to build. So the team was, the team was quite excited when we won.