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Brilliant translucency for Adelaide Festival Bridge

Laminated glass has helped to revitalize a major downtown streetscape project in Adelaide, Australia. Soft White Butacite® is used in the lustrous floor panels and clear Butacite® in the balustrades of a dynamic new footbridge by architects Woods Bagot that links two city landmarks in minutes.

DuPont™ Butacite® PVB was used by architects Woods Bagot of Adelaide and laminator DMS of Melbourne for the floor tiles and balustrades of The Festival Bridge, Adelaide (Australia), a new footbridge that links the city’s historic railway station, a listed monument, to a newly-constructed Drama Theatre complex at Adelaide’s Festival Theatre.

The Adelaide Festival Bridge is part of a dynamic urban streetscape project completed in 2004 to revitalize the Festival Center and promenade precinct. The bridge links two buildings that are very different architecturally, yet succeeds in retaining the identity of each of these buildings while also creating its own, by using laminated glass in a way not often seen in civic structures.

The result is surprisingly lustrous, particularly at night when the four-ply laminated glass floor panels, incorporating Soft White Butacite®, are illuminated to provide a dazzling promenade to evening events at the Festival Centre. The bridge’s brilliant translucency, when seen from below, converts the diamond-like glass floor panels into celluloid film strip, with pedestrian movement presented as an engaging shadow play.

Architect David Spencer of Woods Bagot said: “The Adelaide Festival Bridge provides a new level of clarity for pedestrian access from the Casino and Adelaide Festival Theatre. We wanted to use glass extensively to bring clarity to the structure. Toughened glass would not have worked; laminated glass is safer and we could not have made the floor glass structurally strong enough without a 49 mm-thick, 4-ply laminated glass construction.

“The bridge deck and balustrade is designed as a vierendeel truss that provides structural rigidity. The secondary floor structure is orientated on 45 degrees and supports the 1 m2 laminated glass floor panels. The resultant economical steel design, tension net cable support system, translucent glazed flooring and glazed balustrade system result in a light, delicate structure that, whilst iconic in nature, does not compete with the dramatic nature of the Adelaide Festival Centre roof shells or the ordered restraint of the Adelaide Railway Station façade.”

Gerard McCluskey of DMS Glass (Melbourne) said: “The structure of the floor panels in this 12 m-wide.40-m long footbridge is: 12 mm clear glass + 1.52 mm clear Butacite® + 0.76 mm Soft White Butacite® + 12 mm clear glass + 1.52 clear Butacite® + 8 mm clear glass. The top lite, of 8 mm clear float glass is sandblasted with a tactile dot pattern to provide slip resistance.

“The balustrades are made of 6 mm clear tempered glass + 0.76 mm clear Butacite® + 6 mm clear tempered glass. This gives ultra-clear views from the sides of the bridge with minimum obstructions, for people crossing the bridge, particularly because the balustrades are point-fixed at the four corners, so that virtually no fixtures are visible.”