Tent Typologies

“The hanging roof is in fact something ancient: for the tent is nothing other than a hanging roof.” —Frei Otto, Das hängende Dach

Ancient and contemporary, natural and technical, weightless and weighted, grounded and precarious, architectural and ephemeral, tensile structures—of which tents are an immediately familiar category—offer a clarity of form and articulate fundamental laws of physics at all scales. From the construction and treatment of suspended materials to carefully calibrated frames, each form seeks equilibrium and economy to such a degree that “the structure becomes its architecture,” as the tensile architect Horst Berger once wrote. Whether form-finding is accomplished through tactile intuition or computation, each typology reveals how tensile structures satisfy primeval and modernist dreams of both ephemerality and permanence.