The World's Most Beautiful Bridge Just Opened

Taiwan has a new bridge. And it's a hit. It does all the things a bridge should do, but it also goes a bit further. Because unlike most other bridges, this one is beautiful. With its minimal profile and swooping lines, the Dianjiang Bridge leaps over the Tamsui Estuary. In fact, it could even become a new national symbol alongside the nearby Taipei 101. Despite that, there were some who doubted this day would ever come. Including the guy who built it. Who once wrote it off as impossible. It may look effortless, but building it was anything but straightforward. This may be one of the most challenging construction projects Taiwan has ever undertaken. So a couple of questions. Why bother? And how did they manage to make the impossible a reality? OK, so engineering is all about solving problems. What is the problem here? This is Taiwan. This is its capital, Taipei. And this is the mouth of the Tamsui River. On one side is Bali, an industrial zone housing one of the busiest container terminals in the whole of Taiwan. On the other is Tamsui. Historic district, beloved beauty spot, and rapidly growing commuter town whose population has doubled in less than 30 years. Now currently, to get from here to here, you need to go 6km this way, over this bridge, and back down here. Hardly ideal. But it gets worse. That bottleneck is shared by everyone from the port, the commuter town, and the planned new city of 300,000 people that Taiwan has been trying to build nearby for more than 30 years. But we'll come back to that. This 1km section is one of the most congested in the city. On a bad day, and there are a lot of bad days, it can take over half an hour to drive through it. It's terrible for commuters, but it's also taking its toll on the venerable Guandou Bridge, which was built in 1983 and never designed to cope with this much traffic. So the solution was obvious. Build a new bridge here. Although perhaps it's not that obvious. First off, this gap is just under a kilometre wide, which, although not record-breaking, is still a considerable distance for a bridge to span. The land on either side is soft and low-lying, and because the estuary opens directly onto the Taiwan Strait, it's exposed to enormous winds, not least in the form of typhoons that barrel across Taiwan every year. And as if all of that wasn't enough, it's also an active shipping lane, so any bridge deck would have to sit high enough for vessels to pass underneath. Okay, so tough, but nothing that an experienced team of civil engineers couldn't handle. Except there's one more thing. This is the mouth of the Tamsui River at sunset. And so is this, and this, and this. In fact, the estuary is one of the most photographed beauty spots in all of Taiwan. It faces west, out over the Taiwan Strait, perfectly framing the setting sun and creating one of Taiwan's true natural wonders. So much so that it was once considered one of the island's eight views. That's a big deal, because across East Asia, the number eight is considered lucky or harmonious, and the idea of a place having eight scenic views is part of a long tradition that carries a lot of prestige. For centuries, artists and poets have immortalised locations like this in the Chinese-speaking world and beyond. In other words, the decision to build a bridge across one of the most famous landscapes in Taiwan is not one that gets taken lightly. And it makes sense that if you have to build something there, then it's really got to do justice to its location. And so another requirement was placed on the bridge, one that couldn't be addressed through the cold, hard logic of engineering. It would have to be beautiful. So the Highway Bureau did something unusual. They hired an architect. All the college students would take their boyfriend or girlfriend here to see the sunset and lots of people come here and set up their big camera and also shoot in the sunset. And this is like a tradition. Zaha Hadid Architects, now known as ZHA, is responsible for some of the most iconic and complex buildings of the last 30 years. And now, those same boundary-pushing practices were about to be applied to a bridge. There are many, many teams submitted for the proposal. We are the only competitor. The team actually proposed one tower, one single mast. And the reason why we do that, very importantly, is because we analyse the sunset properly. We understand how we preserve this nature scene. And also we don't want to intervene the wetland at the south side, because if you build a second mast at the south, you're going to destroy the wetland. We make the whole thing look very simple and elegant. First and foremost, the bridge had to appear as minimal as possible. We do the cable-stayed bridge because we choose this bridge type because it's very, very transparent when you stay in the distance. The cable itself also dissolves into the sky. If we do the suspension bridge, you have this very, very thick and strong cable crossing to the air. Of course, you will see the gesture, but we feel like we don't want to see that. We want the cable to dissolve the structure itself. A single tower, offset towards the eastern bank so it wouldn't interrupt the sunset views. A deck so thin and light it would seem to hover above the water rather than sit on it. And cables fanning down from the tower like the fingers of a dancer mid-performance. We feel like the bridge itself is such an important piece of infrastructure. Lots of cars driving by every day. We want to create a very dynamic driving experience. And coherently, also kind of coincidentally, there's a very, very important local contemporary dance group also based in Tamsui. So that's why when we visited the location and then we understand how a very interesting link between the body's movement and also the whole design. And we kind of try to transform this kind of very dynamic body gesture and into the shape of the tower. The rhythm of the bridge, the way the tower rises, curves and splits, the way the deck gently undulates was all intended to echo the movement of dancers on a stage. Even the street lighting was designed around this concept. Instead of uniform lampposts marching across the deck, the lights raise and fall in a wave as if choreographed. Now all that sounds great, but there's just one thing. Architects don't usually design bridges. Unlike a museum or a skyscraper, bridges tend to be functional structures that civil engineers are more than capable of designing themselves, thank you very much. Most of the bridge, most of the infrastructure, you actually just need an engineer to make sure everything connects, nothing falls apart and it works. But the Danjiang Bridge wasn't just meant to be another piece of infrastructure. This was intended to be a landmark. And with that came an allowance for architectural flair. The trouble was, that flair created a whole new kind of complexity when it came to actually building the thing. There's lots of media and people were saying, oh, is it a Zaha project? This is too simple. Where's the Zaha curve? This is too simple. Is Zaha the architect? But when the contractors step in and they start, oh, when we're looking for the valley engineer, and they were looking for engineers to start looking to the design, it was like, oh my god, they said, this is too difficult. Every swooping curve and tapering surface had to be justified. And that was one of the big challenges this project had to grapple with. Take that tower. It doesn't just go straight up. It starts as two columns which meet just above the bridge deck, where it curves outward and then becomes convex as it rises, splitting into a gentle Y shape near the top. A standard engineer's approach would have been to build a giant concrete column. Not because engineers lack imagination, but because it's the most efficient and cost-effective way of delivering the design. And that's largely because of the way it's built. If you've ever walked past a construction site in a big city, you'll no doubt have seen these huge concrete towers that form the basis of most high-rise buildings. They're built using something called slip-forming. Concrete is poured into a mould, the concrete sets, the mould is jacked up and the process is repeated until you have your tower. It works best when you're building a really tall, simple shape like a cuboid or a cylinder. The mast of the Danjiang Bridge is tall but not exactly simple. So how do you build that for the same price as a solid column? Clearly what they couldn't do was build a new mould for each section. Instead, they turned to slip-form specialists PERI to create an ingenious solution. Together, they developed a mould made up of sections that could be repositioned, extended or retied as the structure rose. As the tower grew, the mould changed shape to accommodate the shifting geometry. Problem solved. Except the tower was the tip of the iceberg. And what nearly sunk this project from the start wasn't the design on the drawing board, but rather the drawing board itself. Of course, the procurement in Taiwan, the infrastructure procurement is still quite a traditional way. Unfortunately, the tender is still going to 2D. These people are going to take the 2D drawing and rebuild the whole project themselves, and which we will have concern about the accuracy. The project was put out to tender eight times. On the first seven tries, no contractor was willing to step in. In fact, Li Yongqing of Kung Sing Engineering, one of the firm's approached to build it, described the project as mission impossible. The problem was the sheer complexity. Taiwan still requires projects like this to be based on drawings, 2D documents showing the project in plan, elevation and cross-section. But every element of the Danjiang Bridge was geometrically unique. The twisting tower, the deck segments, each subtly different from the last. The connections between components had tolerances measured in millimeters across structures that were hundreds of meters long. Looking at the drawings, the contractors who were bidding for the project just couldn't get their head around how the structure was supposed to come together. And that's when one piece of software came to the rescue. At the beginning of the design stage, we feel like this is absolutely a perfect project to use criteria because they can handle a complex geometry and also can handle lots of different components. Here I migrate from the V5 to V6, which is a very good thing to go to the cloud. So that's why we believe if we work here in London and people in Germany and Taiwan, actually we can use their cloud platform. Everything is to go through the cloud in 3D, so which means that we have very, very high precision work. When the German engineer actually also look into the model, and then we can check all the discrepancies immediately, and then we can also exam to see everything can match the drawing or drawing can also can match the 3D model. So that was quite a good process. What Katia allowed the design team to do was build a complete full-scale digital twin of the entire bridge, a one-to-one representation of every single component. Each cable was created with its precise geometry, showing how it would hang and interact with the forces loaded onto the wider structure. Because the bridge was modelled this way, the entire thing could be taken apart digitally as an assembly. It allowed engineers to fly through it, take a section at any point, or check whether components clashed with each other, all before a single piece of steel had been fabricated. For the Danjiang Bridge, where the geometry was changing in three dimensions simultaneously, that level of functionality and detail was quite literally the difference between this bridge being buildable and not even happening. Government also see the value, so that's why they think this is quite a good way to present, because for the government leader, they don't know how to model it, but we can explore the 3D XML, they can spin around in their phone and see the stuff. And then we can do the quantification and very precisely, and then they can go to the costing and quite quickly. So that's why this whole CATIA operation is really kind of changing the nature of a way of working. And this is also not just to the designer and also to the contractor. Physical drawings were still produced in line with Taiwanese regulations, but it was by adopting CATIA that this project finally became properly understood. Finally, on the seventh tender, a contractor was found to take it on. I grew up in Taiwan, and to really build something in your home turf, actually, it should give you quite a different feeling. You know, one of the most comfortable moments is actually seeing your project being used every day by so many people. You see lots of happy face and you see family and people using it. And I think that's, as a designer, as an architect, I think this moment, it's highly rewarding. On the 12th of May 2026, after seven years of construction, the Danjiang Bridge opened. Road users in this part of Taiwan are feeling the benefits immediately. But of course, that was only ever half the journey. The view of the river has changed permanently and you could even say for the better. Thanks to engineer and architect, this bridge is holding up both sides of the bargain. This video was sponsored by CATIA. You can learn more about that at the link below. Don't forget that whenever you guys take the time to go and check out one of our video sponsors, it massively helps us out here at the channel. So please do take the time to go and check out CATIA. We would really appreciate it. And as always, guys, if you enjoyed this video and you want to get more from the definitive video channel for construction, make sure you're subscribed to The B1M.