The slick tempered-glass panels of Santiago Calatrava’s Ponte della Costituzione in Venice cause 'almost daily' falls. After years of lawsuits, the city is finally replacing the panels with stone to prevent more face-plants. awalkerinLA reports
The slick tempered-glass panels of Santiago Calatrava’s Ponte della Costituzione have fractured at least two people’s bones. Photo: Mondadori Portfolio/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images When Santiago Calatrava was first commissioned by Venice in 1999 to design the Ponte della Costituzione, it was meant to be a dramatic gesture imbued with symbolism: the first new bridge to cross the Grand Canal in 75 years, literally connecting the city’s past to its future.
The bridge, opened in 2008, is somewhat of a stylistic departure for Calatrava, who is best known for ebulliently sculptural suspension bridges and bleached-rib-cage buildings. I was in Venice for the 2012 architecture biennial, when the slippery bridge had already gained quite a bit of notoriety, and when I went to see it, I noticed several people, clearly architects, inspecting its surface on the ultimate design Schadenfreude pilgrimage.
Calatrava was first sued by the city in 2014, after a series of eight glass panels meant to be replaced every 20 years broke after four. One prosecutor described the bridge as an “unbelievable chain of errors,” and in 2019, a Roman court found Calatrava guilty of “macroscopic negligence” and fined him €78,000. Yet Calatrava has maintained the bridge’s integrity.
What happened with the Ponte della Costituzione isn’t even Calatrava’s first pedestrian-bridge misstep — in fact, he repeated the exact mistakes he made on a Bilbao bridge completed just before it, proving that basic walkability isn’t his major concern. Bilbao’s Zubizuri footbridge, completed in 1997 to connect the city’s downtown to the new Guggenheim, is made from similar tempered-glass planks that caused slips and shattered until the city installed rubberized flooring over the glass.
In one of the Venice-bridge rulings, a lower court at first sided with Calatrava’s argument that “incorrect use” of the bridge, in the form of visitors’ roller bags, is what damaged the steps. The higher court ruled that Calatrava should have known better when selecting such fragile materials, particularly due to the location of the bridge, which is directly adjacent to the city’s only train station.