Bridge of Peace

Michele De Lucchi's 2010 footbridge over the Kura River was engineered less as a crossing than as a light installation you happen to walk through. Its steel skeleton, curved like a wave or a shell, is wrapped in a glass canopy fitted with 1,208 individually controlled LED units, plus motion-triggered LED strips built into the handrails that light up as pedestrians pass — 240 sensors track people crossing and respond to them directly rather than running on a fixed loop. Once an hour, lights along both parapets spell out a message in Morse code that ticks through the periodic table of elements, a design touch few visitors notice unless they happen to be standing there watching for it.

The bridge became a flashpoint the moment it was proposed. Its glass-and-steel futurism sits squarely inside Tbilisi's Old Town, a district of nineteenth-century balconied houses and centuries-old churches, and critics — including architects, historians and ordinary residents — argued that dropping a structure this aggressively modern into that setting was less an act of design than an act of disruption. Supporters countered that a historic district frozen against any contemporary addition risks becoming a museum piece rather than a living city. The debate outlasted the construction and, in various forms, still surfaces whenever the bridge comes up in conversations about how Tbilisi should grow.

Getting there

Located in Tbilisi. Tbilisi International Airport (TBS) is about 12 km away.