30-Foot Glass Bridge Built Using Ancient Mesopotamian Principles

Six years of planning, drafting and revising culminated in the development of a 30-foot all-glass bridge built using ancient engineering and architectural principles.

The bridge, dubbed “Glass Bridge: The Penn Monument for Hope,” was built by University of Pennsylvania professor of architecture Masoud Akbarzadeh and research assistant Boyu Xiao of the Weitzman School of Design, along with collaborators including Yao Lu of Jefferson University. It resides at the Corning Museum of Glass.

The bridge comprises interlocking hollow glass units without traditional reinforcements, such as steel.

“All these pieces alone, hollow glass units, might seem quite brittle—and they are,” says Akbarzadeh. “But depending on how you design to put these glass units together, they start relying on each other, and the units’ assembly establishes a path for the load to be transferred efficiently. Thus, the bridge gains strength as a whole.”

The project began in 2017 with the conceptualization and design of the bridge. Akbarzadeh says the original concept centered around using thin sheets of glass to build a “super-efficient structure.” The engineering drew on techniques that date back to the Mesopotamian age, around 4000 BCE, particularly funicular design, which harnesses compression to achieve stability and strength.

Akbarzadeh and his team designed the bridge to “channel forces along ideal compression paths.”