The Erasmus Bridge seen from the City of Rotterdam Holland in the evening with City lighting by Bart Ros

About "The Erasmus Bridge seen from the City of Rotterdam Holland in the evening with City lighting"

by Bart Ros

About the artwork

The Erasmus Bridge seen from the City of Rotterdam Netherlands Holland in the evening with City lights
The Kop van Zuid was originally used as a harbor area. With the shift of Rotterdam's port to the west, this area was redeveloped in the late 1980s based on a plan by Riek Bakker and Teun Koolhaas. An important part of this plan was a new bridge ("Nieuwe Maasbrug") that should open up the Kop van Zuid from the center. Teun Koolhaas's designs already included a bridge with a single pylon,[3] and the bridge was designed to be a single-pylon bridge.

The first designs for the bridge were made by Maarten Struijs, architect of municipal works,[4][5] who started making designs for the future bridge from 1987. Struijs' final design was a so-called "four-stick bridge" that should cost 325 million guilders (€147 million euros).

In the course of 1990, structural engineer A. Krijgsman of engineering firm ABT[6] was asked by the Urban Development Department to supervise the design process. He brought in architects Ben van Berkel (UNStudio) and Wim Quist, who also started making designs for the bridge. The van Berkel design was particularly well received by Stadsontwikkeling and alderman Joop Linthorst. The van Berkel bridge would be more expensive than Struijs' design: 365 million guilders (165 million euros),[3] but it did have a striking design: a cable-stayed bridge with a single buckled pylon.

The fact that there were now suddenly three designs for the br