Tents of Stone

The “tent” is one of the oldest dwelling archetypes: after caves, nomadic societies began living in tents. Many architects and engineers have found design and structural inspiration in the idea of the tent translated into concrete. This solution expresses a striking contrast between a temporary object—the tent—and its solidification into an immovable and seemingly eternal form: the concrete building.

This paper investigates the conceptual design of five major masterpieces of architecture and engineering that can be understood as concrete tents: the Philips Pavilion, the Church of San Giovanni Battista on the A11 Highway, Dulles International Airport, the Kuwait National Assembly Building, and the Portuguese National Pavilion.

These concrete tents represent some of the clearest structural and metaphorical solutions in which form, function, and meaning coincide. The paper focuses on how these buildings were designed and on their structural behaviour.

This paper has been published for the 2020 fib Symposium of Conceptual Design of Structures. You can fin the English version for free here at page 401.