The American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) and the National Steel Bridge Alliance (NSBA) recently announced the winners of the 2020 Prize Bridge Awards.
Nineteen bridges were recognized for this year's Prize Bridge Awards. Both AISC and NSBA said that all the winners have made an enormous impact on the lives of the people they serve. One example highlighted was the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge in Big Sur, California, which reconnected a community after a landslide damaged a concrete bridge beyond repair. The new bridge opened for traffic across a narrow, mountainous space only eight months after the existing bridge was closed.
“These projects are tributes to the creativity of the designers and the skills of the constructors who collaborated to make them reality,” AISC President Charles J. Carter, SE, PE, PhD, said in a statement. “Steel shines and soars on their talents and we celebrate the accomplishments these projects represent.”
Since Pittsburgh’s Sixth Street Bridge won the first competition in 1928, more than 600 bridges of all sizes from all across the U.S. have received a Prize Bridge Award. Some of those bridges, such as the Wabash Railroad bridge in Wayne County, Michigan, which won a prize in 1941 and still carries railroad traffic more than 70 years later, have actually outlasted the companies that built them.
The winning bridges include the following:
- Short Span:
- National: Vine Street Expressway (I-676) reconstruction project - 18th to 22nd Streets; Philadelphia
- Merit: Anchor Bay Drive; St. Clair County, Michigan
- Medium Span:
- National: Grand Avenue Bridge; Glenwood Springs, Colorado
- Merit: Williams Creek (Shoup) Bridge; Salmon, Idaho
- Long Span:
- National: Manning Crevice Bridge; Riggins, Idaho
- Merit: Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge; Big Sur, California
- Major Span:
- Movable Span:
- National: Sarah Mildred Long Bridge between Kittery, Maine and Portsmouth, New Hampshire
- Merit: Bayou Sara Swing Bridge; Mobile County, Alabama
- Special Purpose:
- Rehab:
- National: Andy Warhol (Seventh Street) Bridge; Pittsburgh
- Merit: Winona Bridge; Winona, Minnesota
- Reconstruction:
- National: BNSF Wind River Bridge; Skamania County, Washington
- Merit: I-240 MemFix 4; Memphis, Tennessee
- Special Award for Resilience:
Judges weighed each project’s use of structural steel from both an architectural and structural engineering perspective, with an emphasis on creative solutions to the project's program requirements; applications of innovative design approaches in areas such as connections, gravity systems, lateral load resisting systems, fire and/or blast protection; aesthetic and visual impact of the project; innovative use of architecturally exposed structural steel; technical or architectural advances in the use of the steel; and/or the use of innovative design and construction methods.
Awards for each winning project will be presented to the project team members involved in the design and construction of each winning bridge during an NSBA event in June.
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SOURCE: American Institute of Steel Construction
