A family of archetypal bridges with distinctive railings was designed for the Harnaschpolder district in Delft. The railings feature texts which were inspired by the history and landscape of Harnaschpolder. This project comprises 27 bridges and 12 culvert bridges.
All the balustrades have a floating beam design, connected by a series of steel strip uprights. There are subtle differences between each of these beams, depending on their location and the route they are part of. They are all made of concrete, stainless steel or wood. The concrete balustrades are on the routes to and from Delft city centre and have texts based on landscape themes such as ‘Abundance of water’ and ‘Wide expanses’. The short footbridges have wooden balustrades with texts on the theme of ‘Bridging’. All texts were written by linguistic artist Margriet van Bebber. Typographer Peter van Blokland designed a unique font – Harnasch Sans – especially for these texts.
The bridges with steel banisters have been placed at a right angle to the concrete-banister bridges, thus forming ‘growth rings’ around the centre of Delft. The images on the banisters refer to significant periods in the history of Harnaschpolder, e.g. the Stone Age, Middle Ages and Horticulture. Artist Mariska van den Enden created the designs, which were subsequently digitised and laser-cut into stainless steel sheeting.
