ABSTRACT
Overhead transmission lines, unused washing lines, and a just completed suspension bridge cable, as yet free of its intended burdens, are all catenaries. In bridge design, it has tended to provide economic solutions to those bridges just beyond the spans for which an arch would be feasible, and where it would not be considered economic to bring on to site the cable spinning equipment necessary for a continuously curved suspension cable. It is the cable-stayed form rather than that of the parabolic suspension cable that has been infused from civil engineering into architecture since designers came to regard the tensile form as a legitimate response to briefs demanding large spans. A suspension cable carrying a uniformly distributed load is curved in the shape of a parabola. The provision of additional cables to secure resistance to horizontal forces is a common feature in cable-stayed buildings.
