Competition for the bridge for the Rottweil 2028 State Garden Show decided

In four years’ time, the town of Rottweil am Neckar will be hosting the State Garden Show. The green project will take place in the historic town center and on both sides of the Neckar. Rottweil needs a bridge for pedestrians and cyclists to cleverly connect the areas of the State Garden Show and to enable visitors to cross the railroad tracks and the Neckar. A competition for the new Landesgartenschau bridge has been launched. It has now been decided which bridge Rottweil will get.

Rottweil needs a bridge that fits in with the listed cityscape, the renaturalized Neckar and the recreational area in the floodplain. A total of 19 entries were received in the competition for the bridge for the State Garden Show. The jury of architects, members of the local council and city administration, experts from the fields of monument, landscape and nature conservation, engineers and structural engineers came to a unanimous decision: the winner of the competition is the bidding consortium Johannes Pellkofer Architektur, Mannheim, with MSIng Matthaei + Schotte Ingenieure from Stuttgart. In the eyes of the jury, their bridge design has great added value for the picturesque, romantic Neckar town, which extends far beyond the temporary State Garden Show 2028.

Overall, the winning design impresses with its simple and unpretentious design. The new bridge is finely structured, clearly designed and minimalist in its formal language. Pellkofer’s idea is based on a sensitive combination of a historically evolved landscape and cultural space and modern bridge construction. The bridge is not only designed with the Rottweil State Garden Show in mind, but is also intended as an important permanent and barrier-free connection between the town and the eastern bank of the Neckar. For the special landscape around Rottweil, the Johannes Pellkofer and MSIng Matthaei + Schotte consortium developed a structure that visually dominates neither nature nor the historic old town.

Johannes Pellkofer and MSIng Matthaei + Schotte Ingenieure avoided supporting structures above the sidewalk so that the view of Rottweil and the landscape along the Neckar can unfold freely. Thanks to the use of steel as a very stable and efficient material, the structure appears to simply swing from support to support. The bridge is also a user-friendly structure. Its regular widenings create small islands with beautiful views from which to linger, without restricting the movement of joggers and cyclists – traffic can still continue to flow. An additional staircase on the city side connects the bridge and the Landesgartenschau site, as well as a platform planned by Deutsche Bahn in the future. The surfaces of the bridge are planned in silver-grey, which reflects the colors of the surrounding nature and embeds the filigree structure even more intensively in its surroundings. The jury, chaired by expert judge and architect Jörg Aldinger, “particularly appreciated the experience of the bridge from the perspective of the surrounding landscape: the structure blends discreetly into the historic urban fabric and yet formulates an independent design language. The bridge’s light appearance creates an appropriate sense of scale, while the sculptural effect remains very tangible”.

In addition to commendations, the jury also awarded second, third and fourth prizes. It awarded second place to the design by engineering firm schlaich bergermann partner from Stuttgart with Daniel Gebreiter as architect. The team has planned a bridge that spans the valley as an elegant ribbon. The highlight here is in the detail, such as the lighting concept. This consists of minimal lighting that runs on both sides at handrail level and sets subtle lighting accents on the railings. In addition to the careful and environmentally friendly lighting composition, the plan was to furnish the area with benches combined with plant arches. This was intended to create spaces for passers-by to linger.

Third prize went to the duo Feuerstein Hammer Pfeiffer Architekten from Lindau and baustatik relling from Singen as structural engineers. For the designers, the location and space were the star, and the bridge was not to outshine it. This meant that no unusual elevations of the supporting structure or lines were used. The silhouette of the city, the natural environment and the Neckar determine the design and construction. The bidding consortium proposed a four-span slender arch bridge with restrained elegance and a simple, straight ground plan geometry. They shaped this into a modern bridge structure for the Rottweil State Garden Show.

The fourth prize was won by Next architects from Amsterdam in collaboration with IB Miebach Ingenieurbüro für Holzbau und Holzbrückenbau from Lohrmar. What is special about this design? As a sustainability strategy, the planners chose wood as the most important building material for the bridge. This was to be combined with granite decking. Here, too, the design goes beyond the design of a simple crossing. The bridge ribbon meanders in a gentle zigzag line through the landscape and from one side to the other. The contours give it the appearance of a wooden sculpture and would have set a special accent at the State Garden Show. The use of wood not only gives the bridge a pleasant natural appearance. It also connects it in substance with the surrounding nature. In the middle section of the bridge for Rottweil, the zigzag formation would have given strollers completely different perspectives of Rottweil and the surrounding area and enriched the State Garden Show with further visual experiences.

Read more about another competition decision here: the Getrauden Bridge in Berlin.