Tensile Structures & Lightweight Building Workshop, or, “Madam, do you know how much your house weighs?”
Tensile structures and lightweight building systems continue to evolve and are becoming commonplace in contemporary architectural practice. Fabric membranes, cable nets, rigid shells, frames and other lightweight components are being implemented for reasons that include increased daylighting and performance, and decreased embedded energy costs.
This workshop introduces basic structural and geometric concepts and related tensile and lightweight material choices through texts, design, and hands-on construction of full-size mock ups and test structures. Basic tensile design is offered through a series of crafted exercises. The final project is the construction of a complex geometry that displays an integrated structure and skin, or specifically investigates one of the several topics offered herein.
Weekly topics include: suspension structures, cable nets, membranes, pre-stressing, shells and folded plates, geodesics, and tensegrity structures.
practice tensegrity model
stressed skin model
long span tensegrity installation
geodesic model exercises
shell and two-way truss studies
cardboard shell structure installation