11 – 2014

Wide-spanning

Of the current circumstances of building the load-bearing structure is least affected by social situations: there is nothing to debate about the facts of loads and transferring them and cloud hooks are something that exist only in jokes. Precisely because of their unquestionable clarity engineering structures are also extremely popular in architecture; since Rem Koolhaas’ “Maison à Bordeaux” or Meili, Peters Murausteg wide-spanning and unusual structures have formed part of the design repertoire. The view of load-bearing structures taken by those who design architecture is first of all an aesthetic one and sufficiently far removed from the search for necessity that is typical of the work of engineers; architects are interested primarily in the spatial effect of a structure, perhaps in its conceptually unifying power, at best in the monumental values that it inscribes in the design. But perhaps it is precisely here that the disciplines meet: in the discussion published here Jürg Conzett maintains that engineers are susceptible to the pathos of wide-spanning constructions. But a structure also follows a visual idea. Structural concepts still most reliably arrive at their form through pencil and paper. The forms of the engineers, exactly like those of architecture, are also images of the building of the world and therefore express associated values – the question is which ones.