Gantries for National Highways - RIBA Competitions

The competition sought to discover a more streamlined, elegant, and consistent visual appearance for roadside gantries to enhance the public’s experience when driving on the National Highways network. Existing designs tend to be heavily engineered, and with an emphasis on function over form, can result in visually intrusive structures that are not overly sympathetic to their settings. The challenge was to create innovative structures that can accommodate the existing signage and equipment to work sympathetically in roadside environments – whether they form part of a landscape that is urban, residential or an area of natural beauty.

Form

Simple, elegant and striking. Designed around a 2.1m walkway providing fully safe access to signs, PV and cameras without closing the road below, for both construction and maintenance.

Practical

Panels are off-site fabricated, lightweight and easily replaceable in sections, designed for all environmental conditions including heat/cold and allowing wind to flow through. The design is retrofit-able onto existing structures.

Design Efficiency

Developed as a series of modular lightweight panels – only 5 different sizes used for all gantrys, including retrofit. This improves efficiency for both new and existing construction including any maintenance or potential replacement either in sections or in whole.

Material Choice

The materials and mesh are developed for robustness, life expectancy, light-weight (minimum embodied-carbon) and providing structural integrity around the new walkway structure and existing structures. These are designed to evolve over the years ensuring that they remain both practical and current.

Design palette

Simple kit of parts for the construction, including off-site fabricated panels enabling easy construction and replacement, but all easily accessible from the walkway allowing easy maintenance from above. This includes ‘fold-down’ access to the PV and signs without having to close the road. Structurally the designs have all been based on a similar approach to the existing, ensuring through retrofit, minimal differences in weight and wind-loading, but with a visually more sensitive aesthetic.  

Environmental sensitivity

Subtle visibility through structure, in-keeping with both a rural or urban setting, developed as a piece of street furniture.

Enhanced road-user experience

Gantry is clearly visible, with contrasting colours to enhance legibility, whilst providing cost-efficient contextually sensitive ability to add patterns/images to define location.

Sustainability and Net-Zero

Gantry’s are simple steel frames, encased in lightweight, fully recyclable mesh panels giving a net-zero approach; incorporating in-built PV cells, all of which are easily maintainable/upgradable without closing the road.