On the Occasion of the 70th Anniversary of the Cities of Sušak and Rijeka Union - On the Possible Origins of the Project for the Construction of Rijeka Triple Bridge

Abstract

In October 1946., just a year after the liberation of Rijeka and Sušak and the removal of the border between these two separately developed towns, construction of new bridges designated their physical integration. Constructing the detached road bridge and the pedestrian bridge-square as well as shortening the Mrtvi kanal channel bed by filling and bridging it, a new urban space of iconic characteristics arose. Although performed with very scarse technical and technological potentials as well as a very reduced choice of construction materials, Rijeka Triple Bridge represents one of the top public spaces realised in socialistic Croatia and Yugoslavia in the early postwar period. Researches of the genesis of the Project design show it was part and the result of urban development design conceived to integrate the towns of Rijeka and Sušak using Delta area as a new pedestrian mixed-use zone . But it is important to underline the influence of some earlier documents and studies like the Master plan of the town of Sušak, approved in 1940, the urban design of the Delta area, studies by the architect Zdenko Kolacio in 1941, as swell as the Project of the urban arrangement of the Delta area made by Italian architects in 1942. at the request of the Italian occupation administration.