Now hear this. For a giant, cochlear band shell called Tubaloon, which hovered over Norway’s annual Kongsberg Jazz Festival this past summer, the designers of Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta caught an echo from architectural history. Project architect Joshua Teas says his team drew inspiration for Tubaloon from the curving walls and warped twists of the steel-cable-supported Philips Pavilion, which Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis created for Brussel’s World Expo of 1958.
But to realize the homage, Snøhetta riffed on an innovative engineering concept developed in 2000 by Swiss engineer Mauro Pedretti. Called Tensairity, Pedretti’s proprietary technology features long-span beams that minimize strut material by using low-pressure air to prevent compression elements from buckling. The basic Tensairity girder, now produced by Pedretti’s Swiss company Airlight, features an air-filled fabric tube connected along the length of a compression element. The tube is then wrapped in two spiraling cables that tie into and strengthen the strut. The effect is a strong strut member with considerably less structural weight and construction time.
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