After fifty years as a major vehicular corridor across Lake Washington, we propose to submerge the 520 floating bridge five centimeters below water level in Lake Washington to transform it from the world’s longest floating bridge to the world’s longest subsurface pedestrian walkway. By enabling visitors to set foot on this submerged walkway and appear to be mysteriously treading on water, the old 520 creates a unique experience that questions our relationship with nature and tension with vehicular infrastructure. This transformation has the potential to integrate and reconnect outdated infrastructure into part of our everyday urban nature. We intend to create an experience that brings about intimate collisions between a once dominating urban structure and urban nature at the horizon by invoking the memory of the floating bridge, an absent presence that continues to endure beneath the lake surface.
Location: Seattle, WA
Date: September 2012
Project Team:
Masayuki Sono, Ostap Rudakevych, Yuko Sono, Lapshan Fong