Colbert Bridge

Built between 1887 and 1888 and opened to traffic on 1 January 1889, the bridge crosses the basin to link Dieppe with the Pollet, a fishermen’s quarter that the digging of the channel enlarging the port had cut in two. It is of puddled and rolled iron, hot-riveted: the deck is the work of the engineers Louis Baret and Girardin, the hydraulic machinery that turns it came from the industrial engineering company Fives-Lille, and the whole from the engineer Paul Alexandre, awarded a silver medal for it at the 1900 Universal Exhibition. Listed as a historic monument in 2020 and returned to the water after two and a half years of restoration, it pivots on itself to let ships through: it is that movement, and the transparency of the lattice, that make the whole structure.

At night the bridge comes down to two materials: a lattice that has to stay open, a deck that has to stay walkable. The metal takes on a cool hue that lifts it off the sky without ever filling it in; the crossing, warmer and lower, stays at human height.

Avoiding the pitfall of head-on lighting, which turns the metal lattice into an opaque mass and erases any sense of the void. Our approach relies on controlled backlighting: lit from behind and from below, each member stands out in silhouette, preserving the lightness and transparency of the structure.

Seen from the quays, the bridge then reads as a drawing laid on the water, with the night keeping the articulation between the deck and its turning circle legible. A blue line follows this pivot circle, tracing the luminous signature of its rotation into the night.