About Crystal Bridges
Museum | Building | Architect | Facts
Crystal Bridges: An Innovative Design
Designed by world-renowned architect, Moshe Safdie, Crystal Bridges will offer a wide range of spaces for indoor and outdoor activities for all age groups. The site selected is a ravine fed by Crystal Spring, steeply sloping with mature trees – extraordinarily beautiful, yet fragile. The challenge of the design was to create a powerful sense of place in harmony with its setting, and to connect it to its surrounding community, including downtown Bentonville.
A Campus Within Crystal Ponds
Two structures, which are both dams and bridges, will be placed across the ravine forming two great ponds. Additional structures will be nestled into the steeply sloping terrain on either side, containing galleries, classrooms, a library, a lecture hall, curatorial and administrative offices. The bridge structures will contain galleries in the northern bridge and reception and hospitality facilities in the southern one. Further south within the pond, on axis with the bridges, will be a glass-enclosed gathering space that can accommodate up to 300 people.
A great variety of outdoor public spaces, including protected courtyards and promenades along the water’s edge, will interweave the complex. The rest of the site, approximately 100 acres, will be developed as a public park, including trails, sculptures and picnic grounds, well connected to the campus. The complex will have two principal entrances. An east entrance will connect Crystal Bridges to the regional roads, provide underground parking and truck docks and serve the public arriving by car. A south entrance will connect the museum to the trail system that leads to downtown Bentonville, a 15-min. walk.
The design aims to enhance and protect the natural beauty of the site and to achieve a high level of sustainability in the use of construction materials and methods, maximizing reliance on daylight, water and flood management. Plant life will be integrated into the architecture, creating a constant dialogue between the building and the landscape.
The buildings will incorporate primarily wood, harvested from the region, and architectural concrete. Innovative systems of construction of laminated wood and wood lattice space-frames will be used in the bridge buildings, the Great Hall and the roofs of the gallery structures. Glass will be used generously, and it will always be well-shaded. The architecture seeks to create an expression of the region, its fauna and flora, and particularly its history and culture.
