It seems like a small project. It isn't. Before the bridge, you could only reach HOTA by car, along an arterial road that told you nothing about where you were going or why you might want to be there. The bridge – a pragmatic bit of infrastructure built over an active waterway –  changes the experience entirely: now, you can walk, scoot or cycle from the buzz of Chevron Island and Surfers Paradise and arrive at the cultural precinct on foot.

The bridge is wrapped in 40 Million Mornings, an artwork by Warren Langley and Jess Austin that lights up over Evandale Lake after dark and announces the precinct from a distance. The landing at the HOTA end curves out over the lake, doing a loop that connects to both the HOTA Gallery and to the walkway circling the arts precinct peninsula. It presages the whole site: a gateway moment that tells you what kind of place you're entering.

Spot the fig tree in the middle of it, saved from the site during construction and planted on the bridge deck. It's a detail that shouldn't work and absolutely does – a piece of the original place, suspended over water, now thoroughly established and thriving.

Like all ARM’s HOTA projects, the bridge is a highly resolved piece of the artscape the masterplan is still building. Each project – every landing, abutment, and bit of associated landscape – is resolved as a piece of the larger whole. No aborted edges where one project ends and another begins, but a continuous precinct knitting together one project at a time.