The origins of fabric structures can be traced back over 44,000 years to the Ice Age and the Siberian Steppe, where remains have been found of simple shelters constructed from animal skins draped between sticks.
image: DB
… lightweight portability of fabric structures inevitably brought about a long and close association with the military…
Conservation Wiki writes:
It is likely that structures of this type were the first dwellings actually constructed by humans, and it has even been suggested that simple textiles were used for spatial division and shelter before they were used as clothing. Initially associated with nomadic peoples, one of the earliest and most successful types of fabric structure was the loosely woven black tent. The black tent spread throughout the civilised world during the Arab conquests of the eighth century, and its descendants are still in use today.
Black tent.
From these nomadic origins, more permanent urban shading systems evolved. These were initially used to provide cover over streets and domestic courtyards, but later, larger ‘velum’ or ‘velarium’ were developed, primarily to provide shelter at theatres. In more recent times, simple cable stayed, prestressed fabric structures were used to provide decorative shelter for special events. These ‘toldos’ or ‘envelet’ were particularly popular at the end of the nineteenth century in the Cataluna region of Spain. The lightweight portability of fabric structures inevitably brought about a long and close association with the military which began with the first major confrontations and has continued to the present day. By the first century BC the leather tents of the Roman Legions were commonplace, and the later Byzantine armies of the seventh century were recognised specifically by their simple tented shelters….
… Following successful trials between 1946 and 1950, the radome concept was applied to the DEW line early warning system, and in 1953 Walter Bird established the company Birdair primarily for the manufacture of radomes. Since 1946 tens of thousands of radomes have been manufactured, some of the largest being more than 60m in diameter. This generated a great deal of interest in the whole subject of tensile surface structures and stimulated intensive research into fabric composition. Fabric structures had become big business.
In the same year that Birdair began trading, the L.S. Dorton Arena in Raleigh was completed. Designed by Matthew Norwicki and Fred Severud, it was the first modern, doubly curved, pre-stressed saddle structure. Whilst itself not actually made of fabric, its completion is popularly believed to signify the birth of the modern ‘tent’. The Raleigh Arena influenced many architects, and directly inspired both Saarinen’s Yale Hockey Rink (1956) and Tange’s two stadia for the Tokyo Olympics (1961).
A young German architect with a personal interest in lightweight and tension structures visited America during this period, where he met both Saarinen and Severud. The architect, Frei Otto, began exhaustive investigations into the structural principles behind this new generation of buildings. Even before the publication of his thesis ‘Das Hangende Dach’ in 1954, the practical implications of his work were brought to the attention of the tent manufacturer Stromeyer and Co. Peter Stromeyer made both his experience and resources available to Otto, and between them over the next twenty years, they were to undertake much of the intensive research and experimental construction which served to bring pre-stressed fabric structures into the vocabulary of the contemporary architect….
… During the nineteen eighties and nineties, the fabric structures industry became more tentative, concerned with a confidence building process involving the consolidation of structural design techniques and the development of more reliable fabrics. This, however, provided a sound base from which the size and complexity of fabric structures increased, to give us the extraordinary developments we now associate with modern fabric structures such as the fabric roof of the Hajj Terminal at Jeddah Airport (1981) covering nearly half a million square meters, the 320 m diameter Millennium Dome (2000) and Denver International Airport…
