ABSTRACT

Matthew Nowicki's livestock pavilion at Raleigh, North Carolina in 1952 announced the opening of the season of tensile architecture. Engineer's tension was commonly based on the repetition of planar spanning systems over rectangular, circular and oval plans. The bicycle-wheel roof was anticipated by Sir George Cayley's invention, in 1803, of the tension spoke wheel. The interest of architects in tensile structures centred on the problem of form. The challenge of the new structures was to perfect the language of tension. The language of tension was ideally suited to conjuring up the 1920s illusion of weightlessness and of dynamic plastic form. Tensile structures provided the technical means for realising an optically immaterial, almost hovering, appearance. Eero Saarinen and, to a much greater extent. Frei Otto, popularised the tent as a prototype of modern tensile architecture. Saarinen's interest in tensile structures was of long standing.