VanDusen Footbridge

The VanDusen Botanical Garden Visitor Centre remade the garden's arrival sequence, and the footbridge is the first piece of it visitors set foot on. Built along the path leading from the parking lot to the Visitor Centre, it carries pedestrians into the grounds and introduces the timber language of the building ahead.

The Visitor Centre was the first project in Canada to seek Living Building Challenge certification, and the footbridge carries that thinking in its material. An older covered walkway between the Floral Hall and the Garden Pavilion came down early in the project to open sightlines into the garden. Rather than send that heavy timber off site, the team refinished and sealed it and put it back to work as the bridge's deck boards and railings. The structure visitors cross on their way in is built from the structure that stood there before.

Our team delivered the footbridge as design-builder alongside the Visitor Centre roof, a single wood scope spanning both structures.

Still worth confirming from internal records before this publishes: the span and deck width, what the bridge crosses, and whether the substructure is timber or concrete.