Today, a new architecture -- the tent! The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Tents may be the oldest
human architecture. So how do I get off calling
them new? We find evidence of tents made from
mammoth bones and hides 40,000 years ago in the
Ukraine. The nomadic Old Testament patriarchs
wrote, "How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob ..."
And tents endure. When I was 13, I rose at 4:00 AM
one day to help elephants and roustabouts put up a
great circus tent -- 2½ acres of canvas. I
slept in a tent during part of basic training. When
I lectured in Tunisia we drove off into the Sahara
and passed those large flat tents the Bedouins call
home.
Now avant-garde architects introduce membrane
construction. You can hold membranes of Fiberglas
and Teflon in place by slightly pressurizing them
inside. Or you can stretch them over frames like
tents. Either way, these new tents are meant to be
permanent.
I'm just back from New Mexico where gambling is
legal on Indian reservations. Many Pueblos run
casinos that are huge membrane structures. The
Sandia Pueblo Casino, for example, is an inflated
building. It looks like a big quilted pillow.
The great champion of membrane construction, Horst
Berger, began in the 1960s and has created forty
permanent buildings. His Hajj Terminal, built in
1981 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, serves 100,000 Moslem
pilgrims at a time, as they make their hajj to
Mecca. This half-million-square-yard roof structure
is the largest in the world. Its vast swooping
surface is a dazzling sight.
Berger repeated that trick on a smaller scale when
he built the roof for the Denver airport. Unlike
Saudi Arabia, Denver has to cope with snow loading!
Yet the roof can hold 40 to 50 pounds of snow per
square foot. Teflon and Fiberglas roofs also have
superb insulating properties. They filter infrared
and ultraviolet radiation from the sun and admit
visible light. Think of the savings in lighting
costs! The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the
Performing Arts, just north of Houston, has a
membrane roof that's also been shaped for optimal
acoustics.
Berger's structures form much of the really
stunning late-20th-century architecture: The San
Diego Convention Center, The Munich Olympic
Stadium, the huge Tokyo Dome arena, Italy's M &
G Research Laboratory, the Folkestone Chunnel
Terminal.
Of the two membrane types, the inflatable ones have
given some trouble. Several such roofs have
collapsed fairly harmlessly under snow loads. Those
problems are being solved.
Meanwhile, the new tents tell us how the old orders
of architecture have been limited by the range of
natural materials. Now, as we learn to synthesize
strong and durable new materials, a huge range of
architectural possibility emerges. And it emerges
from a technology that'd seemed almost as primitive
as cave dwelling.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
