“Understanding history, materials, and statics is the foundation of civil engineering”, says Luís Calado, the Head of the Department of Civil Engineering, Architecture, and Environment at Instituto Superior Técnico. He was the first to trust the technical skills of future engineers and to stand under the ‘Ponte da Vinci’ (Da Vinci Bridge), which was presented to the school on 22 September.
After three editions of building beer crate bridges (the first in 2022, followed by a longer span bridge in 2023 and the largest in 2024) the Fórum Civil students opted in 2025 to use wooden beams in their project: a bridge with a 6-meter span and a height of 3.3 meters. The inspiration comes from the bridge created by Leonardo Da Vinci in 1502.
After discarding the initial ideas of building a beer crate castle and a dome, the students opted for a different scientific challenge: designing the Da Vinci Bridge to be constructed in the North Garden at Alameda campus using AutoCAD. However, before the actual construction, they had to create a model, as explained by Marta Franca, a fourth-year civil engineering student and one of the project’s builders.
On 18 September, 20 students from the Civil Engineering students’ organisation got together to build “from the middle to the ends” the first Da Vinci bridge of this size ever built at Técnico, according to João Pegas, President of the Fórum Civil.
Hélder Santos, administrator at Jular Madeiras, the company that provided the wooden beams required for the bridge, emphasised the importance of “using low-carbon materials” and noted that “before engineers existed, there were architects and those architects were carpenters”. “Wood can be used in everything, from the most mundane objects to the greatest works”, he concluded.
This activity was part of Under Construction, which aims to “showcase the world of Civil Engineering to 1st-year students”.
