This shared virtual reality experience transports visitors to the mountains of northern Italy in the sixteenth century, where Palladio designed a wooden bridge spanning over thirty meters across the Cismone River. Conceived without piers, the bridge allowed seasonal flows of timber to pass beneath without damaging the structure.

In The Four Books of Architecture (1570), Palladio published four distinct proposals for this bridge. Only one was ultimately constructed, though it has long since disappeared; the remaining three existed solely as speculative designs on the page. In this virtual environment, all four schemes are reimagined and brought into spatial form, reduced to their essential timber frameworks and suspended above the rushing river as open skeletal structures.

Up to four visitors can simultaneously explore the virtual landscape, encountering the bridge not as a static historical artifact but as a functioning piece of infrastructure. Moving within Palladio's timber frameworks, participants collaboratively shape and inhabit the bridge by adding surfaces and enclosures to its structural skeleton. In doing so, they step inside Palladio's structural thinking, transforming abstract architectural prototypes into lived spatial experience.

At the same time, the installation operates as an experiment: participants' movements, interactions, and patterns of collaboration are anonymously recorded and analyzed for ergonomic and human-centered spatial research, extending a dialogue between architecture, behavior, and technology across five centuries.

Author: Zhang Li

Affiliation: School of Architecture, Tsinghua University; Urban Ergonomics Lab, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University

Project Team:

Exhibition Coordination: Deng Huishu, Pang Lingbo,Ye Yang

Tech Development:  Mei Xiaohan, Liu Yifan, Xie Qixu

Spatial & Hardware Design: Wang Ziheng, Cong Hengyi, He Boyan

Digital Asset Modelling: Gao Yaocong, Ma Xiang, Guo Xinyuan, Pan Xiaojian