Cheb Bridge

Historically, the Cheb Bridge was not a traffic barrier but a natural link that allowed residents to move freely from one part of Karlovy Vary to the other. However, the dominance of car traffic gradually separated the city’s energies and cut people off from the river. Our design gives priority back to pedestrians and cyclists. By widening the deck, we create a generous public space that will make the adjacent riverside plots more attractive and turn the existing traffic structure into a focal point of social life, connected to the riverside embankments and planned community events.

In our design, we regard the historic significance of the bridge, its genius loci and the deep personal relationship that the city’s residents have with it as its most important values. We therefore looked for a way to increase the bridge’s capacity without disrupting its authentic expression. We rejected a conventional side extension, which would have overshadowed one of the historic façades, as well as a wide superstructure whose mass would have contradicted the logic of the original stone tectonics. Instead, we propose removing the low-value modern deck and shaping the new structure to resemble the original 19th-century design. The entire widening is thus carried out as an addition “from within”.

We deliberately do not put the contemporary architectural intervention on display in distant panoramas of the city, in which the bridge looks as if it had never been reconstructed. The contemporary layer only reveals itself on closer inspection and through the personal experience of crossing. We add it in the form of elegant elliptical cut-outs in the pylons of the new structure. These openings not only lighten the mass but, above all, create unusual visual axes and views through the entire body of the bridge, bringing a new dimension and a fresh architectural detail to the historic structure.