A timber bridge
that earns
its own light.
Hi — I'm a student at Institut auf dem Rosenberg, and this is a project I designed: a 24 m wooden bridge for our campus that turns every footstep into real, stored energy. Built with timber from the Alps, kinetic floor panels and a small battery — so the bridge powers its own lights at night.
I wanted to connect the upper campus to the sciences wing — without cutting the meadow, and without a boring concrete slab.
So I designed the Kinetic Timber Bridge: a single span made of glulam beams, prefabricated in a workshop and lifted into place in one morning. The deck is the interesting part — 28 small kinetic panels read every footstep, generate up to 8 W per person, and feed a little LiFePO₄ battery underneath. At night, that energy powers the bridge's own LED lighting.
At the lowest point of the campus.
I picked a spot I walk past every day: the small ravine between the Schlössli and the new sciences wing along Höhenweg. Two compact concrete abutments sit at the meadow edges — no piers in the stream, no big excavation.
Every step, measured.
Every step, stored.
Kinetic flooring already exists — it powers parts of London's St. James's tube station, JR East stations in Tokyo and Schiphol terminals. My idea was simple: bring the same proven technology to a school, at the scale of one class walking to the next lesson.
A piece of the campus
that teaches while you walk on it.
Constructible timber
Two GL28h spruce beams, slow-grown in the Alpine basin, finger-jointed and CNC-shaped in Lucerne. Standard joinery, no exotic detail.
Energy from movement
Piezo-electromagnetic plates beneath the walking surface — the same technology used in transit hubs, scaled to school traffic.
A campus that listens
Live step counts, generated watts and CO₂ avoided are streamed into a public dashboard — the bridge becomes a teaching object.