Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 1-7
La Verne College Student Activities Center, California, 1973
(Photograph by the author)
From 1968 to 1983, Horst Berger and David Geiger were partners. Geiger worked
mostly on air-supported structures and Berger with tensioned fabric membranes. In
1976 Horst Berger, working with the architecture firm of H2L2, designed two
significant fabric structures for the bicentennial celebration in Philadelphia. The
Folklife Pavilion spanned 21 meters using fourteen 17-meter-tall vertical masts in
two parallel rows. The Independence Mall Pavilion was the larger one, covering over
4000 square meters using eight tilted mats in two rows for a clear span of
approximately 35 meters. It was one of the largest tensioned fabric spans in the
world at the time it was constructed. Both of these structures used polyvinylchloride
(PVC) as a coating over polyester fabric. They were the first of many successful
Berger designs using a ridge-and-valley geometry.
The gigantic Haj Terminal Building at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia is used to provide shade
for the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who make the journey to Mecca each year
(Figure 1.8). The Geiger Berger firm was indirectly a consultant to the architect-
engineer firm of Skidmore-Owings-Merrill and Horst Berger served as the partner-in-
charge. The structure consists of 210 identical cone-shaped canopies square in plan,
each measuring 45 meters on a side. It covers approximately 47 hectares, was
completed in 1981, and is still the world's largest fabric roof.
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