Building with hyperbolic lattice structures

Building with hyperbolic lattice structures began with the Russian engineer and polymath Vladimir Grigor'evic Shukhov (1835 -1939). After a short summary of the earlier development of building with iron, this chapter will cover the history of this form of construction.

The development of building with iron in the 19th century

The threshold of the 19th century saw many new types of different load-bearing structures arising in western Europe. The conditions for this turn of events were created from the end of the 18th century by the rapid pace of industrialisation and the material being used to make new tools and machines - iron. New methods of production of this metal meant that ample quantities were also available for construction. After thousands of years of the predominance of stone and wood in buildings, architects and engineers were able to use iron not just as a means of making connections but also as a construction material in its own right. The characteristic properties of the new construction material, in particular its high strength, the toughness of wrought iron and, in contrast to the latter, the brittleness of cast iron demanded new types of construction and details. At the same time, the beginning of the 19th century presented architects and engineers with construction tasks quite unheard of before. Spacious railway stations, large exhibition halls for industrial expos and glazed arcades called for new structural solutions to bridge the often considerable spans. The new material's high strength gave designers the opportunity to realise relatively lightweight and delicately proportioned structures.

But designing in iron was destined to have a long developmental phase. Until the middle of the 19th century, engineers cautiously felt their way forward with new types of structures and methods of construction, which led the first iron roof trusses to look very much like their wooden predecessors. However, the creation of iron structures required a complete rethinking of design and construction planning: The necessary prefabrication of the structural members and their details in factories was shifting the focus of the building process from the construction site to the workshop; factory assembly was replacing the flow of conventional skilled craftsmen's operations on site. The expense and effort required to make casting moulds and fabricate connections forced designers to repeat elements as many times as possible. Early consideration of how members could be joined to one another efficiently and erected quickly was increasingly influential in the design and led to new forms of construction, systems and details: "Repetitive elements and standardized connections characterize a system approach to design that implies organizing component hierarchies rather than composing forms," writes Tom F. Peters in "Building the Nineteenth Century". [1] Modular building systems like the one used for the Crystal Palace, built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, in London epitomise this development (Fig. 1). The details in these structures became more and more sophisticated, not only successfully contributing to the continuity of form and load transfer but also fulfilling a wide range of other requirements, such as the ability to accommodate temperature fluctuations and fit in with the sequence of operations on site. [2]

1 Crystal Palace, London (GB) 1851, Joseph Paxton, interior view from "The Crystal Palace Exhibition Illustrated Catalogue", London 1851

Among the many progressive building projects completed by the middle of the century were the cupola of the corn exchange (Halle au blé) by François-Joseph Bélanger and François Brunet in Paris (1811), the casting shop at the Sayn ironworks in Bendorf by Carl Ludwig Althans (1830) and the Palm House in Kew Gardens in London by Richard Turner (1848), all of which have primary load-bearing elements made from cast iron. Developments in bridge-building also had an impact on buildings, for example cast-iron arches, which are usually composed of several segments. New systems appeared, such as the Wiegmann-Polonceau girder, which can be seen in countless railway stations and market halls, and its further development, the sickle girder, which was first used by Richard Turner in Lime Street Station in Liverpool (1849). [3]

"The 1840s marked the end for the first epoch of iron construction, which had been very largely cast iron based," remarks Werner Lorenz in his book "Konstruktion als Kunstwerk". [4] Following the invention of the Bessemer (1856) and the Siemens-Martin smelting processes (1864), wrought iron and eventually steel became cheap and available in sufficient quantities. From 1845, it was possible to produce rolled I-sections, which quickly became very popular. In addition to these technical and industrial advances, the use of the new materials was accelerated further thanks to the development of structural mechanics, which was increasingly seen as a separate engineering discipline. Largely responsible for the recognition of this new discipline was Claude Louis Navier, through his outstanding paper on the elastic behaviours of structures (originally published in French in 1826 [5]), which was available in most European languages from the middle of the century, alongside publications on the theory of trussed frameworks by Johann Wilhelm Schwedler and Carl Culmann (1851) [6], with Culmann also being responsible for developing the technique of graphic statics (1862). These technical and scientific innovations encouraged the development between 1850 and 1880 of many new load-bearing systems whose dimensions were no longer determined empirically or intuitively as before but by calculation. At the heart of the development were the countless new truss systems that came to the fore at this time. "If the fifties were the decade of cautious exploration of new systems, then the sixties began the classic era of trusses in buildings." [7] The railway station halls of this time in metropolises, such as London (e.g. St. Pancras and Victoria stations) and Paris, bear clear witness to the advances in spanning capability and efficient use of materials. Further new load-bearing systems that became very popular because they are statically determinate and therefore simple to design included suspended span girders (also known as Gerber beams) and three-pinned arches, which were used in buildings for the first time by Schwedler in 1865 and set against a splendid backdrop in Charles Louis Ferdinand Dutert and Victor Contamin's Galerie des Machines (Fig. 2), built for the Paris International Exhibition in 1889 [8]. In 1863, Schwedler's success with his "Schwedler domes" was the breakthrough for three-dimensional reticulated shells.

2 Galerie de Machines, Paris (F) 1889, Charles Louis Ferdinand Dutert, Victor Contamin

In the last quarter of the 19th century, the pace of innovation in iron and steel construction in western Europe hit a plateau. While new records for girder spans and building heights continued to be set, the development of a canon of new types of structures was more or less at an end, their design mastered. The eyes of engineers in western Europe were now focused mainly on a new material developing at a tremendous pace at this time: reinforced concrete. The important stimulus to architecture and its revival that the new style of engineering structures of the 19th century and their aesthetics gave is underlined by a quotation from Henry van de Velde, the Belgian architect and designer who was involved in the Bauhaus movement. Writing on the role of the engineer in 1899, he said "there is a class of people from whom the title artist can no longer be withheld. These artists, these creators of the new architecture, are the engineers. The extraordinary beauty inherent to these works of engineers, is based on an unawareness of their artistic possibilities - as it is with the creators of the beauty of our cathedrals, who were also unaware of the magnificence of their works." [9]

The work of Vladimir G. Shukhov, pioneer of lightweight construction

The last quarter of the 19th century was a period of advancing influence for the Russian engineer and inventor Vladimir G. Shukhov, one of the most important pioneers of lightweight construction and modern building with iron and steel. Shukhov was as significant to the development of lightweight structures as outstanding engineers such as Robert Maillart or Pier Luigi Nervi were to the advancement of modern reinforced-concrete construction. However, it is Shukhov's extraordinary versatility which allows him to stand comparison with similar universally proficient engineers at the end of the 19th century such as Alexander Graham Bell or Gustave Eiffel. A wealth of design principles, which are still applied in structural steelwork today, find their roots in Shukhov's works. He was responsible for the first doubly curved gridshell, built the first suspended roofs and developed extremely slender arched girders, which were stiffened by thin tensile members. But it is not this technical finesse alone which makes his structures so fascinating. The delicate, almost dematerialised, structures have a high degree of aesthetic attraction from which it is difficult to disengage. In his homeland, Shukhov was decorated with the highest national awards and is still spoken of today in modern Russian society. However, outside Russia his diverse and extraordinary...