ARQ 87 | Tensile structures | Ediciones ARQ

ARQ-87-Ingles

English versions of the following articles are available online

Title: Tensegrity as critical to the abuse of stable forms
Author: Rafael Beneytez. Professor, ETSAM, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain. / Víctor Manuel Cano. Professor, ETSAM, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
Abstract: Sloterdijk discussed the links between paradigms of static and State; that would be a key reference to understand connections between a structural logic that depends on the existence of balanced interdependencies and open and non-hierarchical social schemes.
Keywords: architecture – theory, nomotop, metastability, tensegrity, presostatics
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Title: A Suspended Stair
Author: Albert Samper. Professor,Pre-Departamental Unit of Architecture, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain. / Blas Herrera. Profesor, Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain.
Abstract: The stair at the Royal SAS Hotel hall shows the early exploration that Jacobsen did on suspended helicoids; it appears as a singular element whose design proved to influence the entire project.
Keywords: architecture – Denmark, Royal SAS, Arne Jacobsen, hanging structures, helicoid
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Title: Three Architectures of Rigid Hollow Rope
Author: Javier Pérez-Herreras. Professor, School of Engineering and Architecture, Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain.
Abstract: Going from the string structures of 19th century aerostatics balloons to the woven columns of Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque, this ar ticle links a series of towers with the search for a tight, light, airy structure.
Keywords: architecture – theory, Giffard, Ito, Kahn, Le Ricolais, Shukhov, woven structures, tensile
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Editorial. Tensile structures

In 1960 the architect Fernando Castillo Velasco was designing a small summer home in the town of Algarrobo, on the central coast of Chile; at the same time, being a partner at Bresciani Valdés Castillo Huidobro studio, he was developing the Unidad Vecinal Portales in Santiago. The Algarrobo house was to be a relaxing place for his family and addressed a series of themes that had been explored in previous projects, such as the house on Simon Bolivar Street from 1947, or the Santos House in Papudo from 1958: open plans, markedly horizontal spatial organization schemes, expressive structural elements. Its small scale and material modesty contrasted with the enormous magnitude of the housing blocks of the Unidad Vecinal, but above all it was the freedom of the air contained within the house that was perhaps the element that most differentiated it from the large projects the studio was developing during those years.

The Algarrobo house1, that the locals called “Tarzan’s house” at the time, was a wood construction consisting of groups of pilotis that held up a horizontal plane –approximately 11 x 7.6 m– which was covered by a weaved membrane literally hanging like a sheet between two rows of wood round posts. Its tensors of eucalyptus rods and thin boards described a catenary that accentuated the minimum thickness of the roof and its independence from all interior vertical elements. Sunlight and air entered generously through interior heights generated on along the outer extremes.

The feel of the Algarrobo house does not hide its proximity to the light sensation of a tent, to the textile architecture of nomads, and even to a certain degree with a lifestyle that leaves hierarchy behind and aspires to relationships of fluidity and openness. An important part of that atmospheric load resided in that thin floating membrane stretched by its own weight over the interior space of the house.

This issue takes advantage of the impetus of the V Latin American Symposium of Tensile Structures organized in 2012 in the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile School of Architecture, and reviews other examples of tensile architecture and the relationships that appear, as in the Algarrobo house, between these structures and certain systems of social, material and formal relationships. Opposed to the logic of architecture in compression, tensile architecture lends some invisibility (for its lightness and density) and is associated with a capacity for change and adaptation: radical architects sought after those very same qualities in the second half of the 20th century, in the attempt to blaze a divergent path from the installed –and maybe too heavy– modernity.