During her fellowship, Lili Boenigk will document understudied bridge-building practices, emphasizing the role of collective participation and culture in infrastructure siting, design, and maintenance.
Lili Boenigk
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Building Technology
Double living root bridge in East Khasi, India, 2011. CC BY 2.0 Arshiya Urveeja Bose.
Jury
Victoria Arbitrio
Nathan Brown
Caitlin Mueller
Edward M. Segal
Yunlu Shen (Chair)
The jury recognized this as an outstanding and thoughtful proposal to study short-span bridges, an often-overlooked category of structure with significant impact on local communities. The research case studies are admirably diverse, ranging from indigenous to innovative construction materials and methods, including material reuse. The resulting report has the potential to provide a valuable synthesis of knowledge for the field.
Yunlu Shen, Juror (Chair)
Rebecca Solnit writes in Storming the Gates of Paradise (2007) that “a bridge is a place where the world opens up in two directions at once.”
By connecting a community to a school, clinic, or market, a bridge conveys opportunity itself. Small bridges especially have multiplier effects for underserved communities, allowing residents to tap into broader economic and cultural networks and offering resilience in the face of localized crises. Whether in rural or urban areas, innovative, low-cost structural engineering solutions draw on local culture and vernacular design practices to weave isolated communities into the fabric of shared opportunity.
In rural areas globally, a billion people lack access to essential services like health care, education, or employment due to impassable rivers. [1] Footbridges can enable consistent access to markets, increasing income by up to 74%. [2] In urban areas, neighborhoods can be cut off from the broader urban fabric by geography, highways, or discriminatory planning practices, with profound equity implications. Across diverse contexts, even the smallest physical connectors can stitch underserved communities back into broader economic and social networks.
Bridges are both a means to resilience, giving communities access to resources in times of crisis, but must remain structurally resilient themselves. From living bridges woven out of Ficus tree roots in India to bridges made of repurposed railcars in the rural American Midwest, short bridges around the world represent astonishing feats of innovative and low-cost engineering grounded in local material landscapes.
Bamboo bridge in Luang Prabang, Laos. © Joshua Carlon.
Lili’s research is opening new ground for both academic research and industry innovation.
And her desire to reduce the environmental impact of construction grows from her broad
education as well as her original research in embodied carbon of large-scale structures. The
trade-off between robust designs and minimizing environmental impact is an essential challenge
for the twenty-first century.
John Ochsendorf, Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Design, maintenance, and regeneration practices in small bridges build community cohesion and enable cultural preservation. In Luang Prabang, Laos, bamboo bridges are collectively reconstructed each dry season, transforming infrastructure into a recurring act of community collaboration and cultural continuity. Designs often draw on indigenous and vernacular technologies preserved by isolated communities over millennia. [3] Just as Solnit describes “the world opening in two directions at once,” the siting of small bridges can also engender radical forms of community engagement and mediation across divides, such as in Rio’s Favela-Bairro footbridges. Bridges become physical manifestations of community identity, cohesion, and pride.
Structural engineering solutions reflect a dialogue with, not a solution to, profound social problems in both urban and rural contexts. I propose an interdisciplinary analysis of eight groups of rural and urban short bridge typologies from the perspectives on structural performance, resilience, and social impact.
This research will document understudied bridge-building practices, emphasizing the role of collective participation and culture in infrastructure siting, design, and maintenance. It will reflect on the changing valences of these structures in the long term, contrasting top-down development projects with local innovations. Finally, it will analyze technology’s roots in culture and ecology through machine learning-informed social network analysis.
Studying bridges with small spans provides a great opportunity to understand how structures can support and influence movement across a range of communities. By carefully selecting bridges that incorporate regenerative technology and creative structural reuse, this project has the potential to stimulate new conversations about how to design at this scale.
Nathan Brown, Juror
Notes
[1] Susan Bornstein, Christina Barstow, Alisha Myers, Abbie Noriega, and Christian Steiner, “The Invisible Rural Access Barrier,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, April 27, 2023.
[2] Wyatt Brooks and Kevin Donovan, “Building Bridges Can Boost Income for the Rural Poor,” Yale Insights, August 5, 2021.
[3] Julia Watson, Lo—TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism (TASCHEN, 2019).
I am thrilled by the opportunity to do interdisciplinary research exploring how social relationships shape structural systems through design and maintenance.
Lili Boenigk
Railcar Bridge in Buchanan, Iowa. Courtesy of Brian Keierleber.
Short-span bridges provide out-sized benefit to the communities they serve; this is well accepted by civil engineers and urban development professionals. Researching and cataloging indigenous construction methods and a wide range of material reuse strategies will encourage broader use of each. And I hope that wider dissemination of this research will prompt future designers to consider more creative alternative solutions.
Victoria Arbitrio, Juror
Lili Boenigk
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Building Technology
is a graduate student in the Building Technology program in the Department of Architecture at MIT. She holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and architecture from Columbia University. Her research focuses on scaling the reuse of structural steel to reduce the cost and carbon intensity of construction, with particular focus on bridges and emerging secondary markets. She is inspired by and seeks to elevate existing, often informal practices of reuse and resale. In parallel, she is interested in how collective material imaginaries shape approaches to maintenance and reuse and has conducted research in construction history on New England’s waterstruck brickmaking tradition. Boenigk is also an avid guerilla gardener and seed collector.
