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Bratislava Corkscrews

Location: Bratislava, SK
Year: 2008
Team: Roman Zitnansky
Photos: Diana Sajdova
Status: Conceptual Study

The project made part of an exhibition CITY INTERVENTIONS
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I was invited to make a project for a interesting "initiative" of my friends /architects/ called City Intervention where about 50 young architects proposed different solutions /for free/ that would make the life in Bratislava better. All the projects were published in a book and were exhibited for public. The initiative had a success and continues in other cities in Czech republic /Brno, Praha/.

Corkscrew, butterfly, exit from a bridge or a motorway… I’m not sure if a professional expression for a cluster of roads and communications creating a spiral and other shapes at elevated crossings exists. And beside such road clusters and labyrinths are created free, large and mostly green areas. Though these areas do not represent any problem or any thorn in the side of daily life for Bratislava citizens, they do not represent any quality either. In fact, they do not represent ANYTHING. This NOTHING is, in fact, vacuum, which is not talked about and which is not interesting for anybody, just like it doesn’t exist at all. But it’s still a part of each city, many times in attractive city parts. If we add the majority of areas of Bratislava’s more important elevated crossings together, we will obtain a considerable figure of 50.5 ha of free, idle area. For a better idea this area is equal to the territory limited by the SNP and Old bridges, or by the Danube river and Einsteinova Street (the territory of Sad Janka Krála with adjacent areas of Aupark, Petržalka’s stadium etc.). These are days of constant increases in land prices and, in spite of that fact, a constant demand for such, it is shocking that the lands concerned are still not of interest to anybody. It is certainly caused by their limited usability due to noise, traffic intensity and pollution rate… But why is the value of these areas lower than the value of other land representing, even under harder conditions, a full-value urbanized city landscape?

A key point of this proposal is to highlight several positive aspects of such seemingly unusable and useless places, to demonstrate a way of using the territory in a rational and efficient manner for its full-valued incorporation in the city life. It’s not my ambition to propose particular solutions, but to offer a guideline and, at the same time, to attract attention to the territory standing beyond anybody‘s interest...

I would like to explain the solution by 3 examples of elevated crossings in Bratislava:

- Staromestská-Kapucínska crossings
- SNP Bridge-Einsteinova crossings
- Bajkalská-Ružinovská crossings

All three examples are located in a full-value city environments (one of them even in the absolute center), and they represent three various solutions...