Sleeping Under the Bridge

          Well now ,living Under the bridge,.....at one time you would have been really down on your luck ,...Now you have to be really successful to get a primo spot like living Under the Champlain Bridge...............hahahahaha  Who the hell would want to live under the Champlain Bridge or any bridge for that matter,with 50,000 or more buses,trucks,cars motor cycles a day whipping by over your head.....please a novel idea,but would you sit out in your front yard & have a bbq,Yikes........not only that but what about the people who already live Under the bridge,they would all of a sudden be 'Homeless'----so we displace people already down on their luck.It's such a weird & dumb idea,that they will probably do it........lol

MONTREAL - The Champlain Bridge is in need of replacement; we can all agree on that fact.

Repairing it would be a very large and expensive mistake. So we need to build a new Champlain Bridge.

But where will the money come from?

How will the new bridge be maintained, and again, with what money?

And what will the bridge represent to the city?

These are the questions that, if left unanswered, will result in an unsuccessful bridge, and Montreal does not need another one.

My thesis for my master’s degree in architecture proposed a new inhabitable bridge for the 21st century in Montreal, connecting the Old Port and Île Ste. Hélène. Thanks to this thesis I received the school’s outstanding achievement award.

So what is an inhabitable bridge? It is a bridge on which people live, work and play. It’s an old idea, one that has mostly been forgotten – though a few examples still remain, like the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, the Ponte Rialto in Venice and a few more scattered around the globe. A handful of architects have tried to revive the idea, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Yona Friedman, Zaha Hadid, and a professor at Université Laval, Zvi Hecker.

The inhabitable bridge answers the questions I posed at the outset:

Where will the money come from? Pre-selling units and space to people who are interested in living and working on the bridge could cover a large part of the bridge’s construction and service costs.

How will it be maintained, and with what money? History shows that all past inhabitable bridges were sustained from the taxes paid by the people who lived or rented space on the bridge. The Champlain Bridge would be the same. An inhabitable bridge generates revenue that a regular utilitarian bridge does not. It pays for itself and then some.

What will the bridge represent to the city? An inhabitable bridge is a statement that does not go quietly. It would create a new and powerful gateway to Montreal. And since Montreal is a UNESCO city of design, a beautiful, innovative and design-hungry city, where better to put a 21st-century inhabitable bridge?

The final question is not “Why build an inhabitable Champlain Bridge?” but rather,“Why not?”