ABSTRACT
The traditional role of the tent in nomadic cultures provides a far better guide to the real nature of tensile architecture than does the modern suspension bridge. Many traditional tent forms are aerodynamically superior to conventional buildings. The early series of light canvas tent structures were built for the Federal Garden Exhibitions at Cassel, Cologne and Saarbrucken, the Interbau Building Exhibition at Berlin, and the International Horticultural Exhibition in Hamburg. The black tent possesses plane deformed membranes similar to the humped tent and this similarity is particularly noticeable in the North African tents. The peaked tents at the Lausanne Exhibition were transitional membrane-cablenet structures. The Montreal tent consisted of an anticlastically curved prestressed cablenet suspended from masts of varying heights, pulled down at restraining points, and bounded by edge cables which transferred the stresses to perimeter anchor points.
