Open air structures provide the best parts of an outdoor experience with protection from the elements. Whether you’re designing a golf resort, amphitheatre, outdoor mall, or even a wharf, tensile membrane structures provide year-round protection from solar glare, heat, rain, and snow. Tensile fabric can be both flexible and printable, creating a variety of style and design options that allow for a signature style without a signature budget.
Tensile materials are available as opaque or in a range of translucencies, so you can control the amount of sun depending on what’s appropriate for the project climate. Even though both the structural fabric and the tensioning system are lightweight, their structural integrity makes them durable for a range of climates and capable of withstanding severe weather events. And because the fabrication and installation can be done more quickly than with “traditional” building materials, the time to construction is shorter than you might expect. Open air structures can be designed and fabricated in PTFE coated fiberglass, ETFE foil, or PES fabric, depending on the specific needs of your project. We have experience in engineering and detailing the most efficient systems.
The five-story, 60’s era West Hills Medical Office Building in Los Angeles was due for an exterior facelift. A complete exterior renovation by Michael W. Folonis Architects revealed that water infiltration had caused structural damage to the existing horizontal plaster awnings; removing them was a costly process that consumed much of the project budget. This […]
We are pleased to have collaborated with KieranTimberlake and the outfit of a parking structure on the Rice University Campus. In their blog post, they describe the concepts they employed to create an iconic sculptural element. For more details see the KieranTimberlake blog post.
