The Hålogaland Bridge: New iconic bridge opens in Norway

By COWI and Dissing+Weitling

Think of San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge, Sydney’s Harbour Bridge or the romantic Charles Bridge in the Czech capital of Prague. These are all landmarks, or symbols of their location, as British Civil Engineer and acclaimed Bridge Designer, Ian Firth, calls them.

Giving a passionate Ted Talk earlier this year, Firth, a consultant with COWI, made one point clear; bridges should be beautiful.

“We tend to design for 100 years plus. They’re going to be there for an awfully long time. Nobody is going to remember the cost. Nobody will remember whether it overran a few months. But if it’s ugly or just dull, it will always be ugly or dull,” Ian Firth says.

Director of Bridges at Dissing+Weitling, Poul Ove Jensen, who is a long-standing architect colleague adds:

“Bridge design is a synthesis of practical requirements, analyses and logic, but at a certain point in the work process, the analyses no longer hold all the answers and so you must rely on your experience and intuition and make subjective choices. These choices are what can cause the difference between a common bridge and an excellent bridge."

A Scandic-Cool design

In close collaboration with Danish architects, Dissing+Weitling, COWI has made a trademark out of adding a certain touch of Scandi-cool to an impressive portfolio of international bridge projects, like the Stonecutters Bridge in Hong Kong, Denmark’s Great Belt Link and – most recently – Norway’s Hålogaland Bridge. All of which are designed together with Dissing+Weitling.

“The location and special functional requirements such as a narrow bridge deck and long bridge span offer a unique opportunity to achieve a distinctive and instantly recognisable look for a suspension bridge, offering a potential icon to the region”, says Poul Ove Jensen.

Theatre of war – and ore

Crossing the deep waters of Rombaksfjorden, a wildly scenic fjord in the municipality of Narvik in northern Norway, the Hålogaland Bridge is situated more than 1,000 kilometres north of Norway’s capital, Oslo, clear of the Arctic Circle and surrounded by snow-capped mountains. This is a region full of natural drama – and beauty – known for rough weather, strong winds and long, dark winters.

This is also where the infamous Battle of Narvik took place during the initial stages of WW2 and where hundreds of tons of mined rock arrive every day on customised supertrains – led by some of the strongest locomotives in the world – from Swedish mines across the border.

Working under Northern Lights

The Hålogaland Bridge – or Hålogalandsbrua in Norwegian – is currently the 22nd longest suspension bridge in the world. 179 metres above sea level, from the top of one of the bridge’s two elegant A-shaped towers, The beauty of the bridge has affected his team partner from COWI, Chief Project Manager Erik Sundet, who has worked on the project for more than a decade.

“Opportunities to work on projects like this one comes very rarely for an engineer – and when they do – they block your calendar for so many years that you do not have time for many other projects on the same scale. In that sense, the Hålogaland Bridge will always be my bridge. This summer I brought my family here to show them the bridge and what I have been working on for so many years," Sundet says.

All year round, dozens of giant cargo ships are anchored up and spread out on the fjord, patiently waiting to sail away with shipments to distant mills. Aiming to create an icon in this already iconic landscape, the architects and engineers chose to go for a less-is-more approach, 'camouflaging' the bridge in to the surrounding backdrop.

"The bridge is located in a dramatic and magnificent scenery, and for this reason, it has been our goal to design the bridge in respect of the natural surroundings. The anchor blocks are recessed in the hills and the only visible parts are the large concrete cones that receive the cables”, Poul Ove Jensen from Dissing+Weitling says.