Dallas Trinity River bridge Calatrava
— a white arch holding a bridge by its cables.
Not only on a wall.
Dallas Trinity River bridge Calatrava, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge opened in March 2012, the first of two Santiago Calatrava bridges over the Trinity River in Dallas. A single 400-foot steel arch leans above the deck and carries it on fifty-eight white cables. The crossing links downtown to West Dallas and the Bishop Arts District beyond. From the levee road the arch reads as a thin line against the sky; from downtown towers at night it lights up white against the dark floodplain. Named for the Hunt-family philanthropist whose foundation funded most of the construction. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge carries Woodall Rodgers Freeway across the Trinity River floodplain between downtown Dallas and West Dallas, opening to traffic on March 29, 2012. The cable-stayed crossing was designed by the Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava and is anchored by a single steel arch rising roughly 400 feet above the deck, the bridge's defining element. It was the first of two Calatrava bridges planned for the Trinity corridor; the Margaret McDermott Bridge, carrying Interstate 30 traffic and parallel pedestrian decks, followed in 2017. The bridge is named for Margaret Hunt Hill, the Dallas philanthropist whose family foundation contributed most of the construction funding.
Calatrava's signature is concrete-and-steel sculpture treated as infrastructure. Here the white-painted steel arch leans toward the upstream cable plane, and fifty-eight cables fan down to the bridge deck in a single sheet rather than the paired stays of more conventional cable-stayed designs. The arch is hollow and was assembled on falsework alongside the river, then jacked into position. The same vocabulary appears in Calatrava's earlier work at Seville's Alamillo Bridge (1992) and Buenos Aires's Puente de la Mujer (2001), each a leaning pylon and a single cable plane. The Trinity arch reads as the largest member of that family.
The bridge is most easily seen from two viewpoints. Trammell Crow Park on the east bank gives a downstream view with the downtown skyline behind the arch; Trinity Overlook Park on the west bank, off Beckley Avenue, gives the framing shot most often photographed. The bridge has six vehicle lanes and narrow shoulders rather than a true pedestrian deck. Walkers and cyclists cross the Trinity instead on the older 1930 Continental Avenue bridge a few hundred yards downstream, which was converted to a linear pedestrian park in 2014. Best photographed at the blue hour, when the arch lighting comes up against the sky.
