Tragwerk und Form

The elective seminar consists of a lecture series that provides an overview of the geometry, form-finding, construction, structural behavior, and qualitative flow of forces of bending-active, surface-active, and form-active structures.

Suspended roofs, prestressed cable nets, shells, gridshells, geodesic domes, tensegrity, folded plate structures, and pneumatic structures are covered using historical and contemporary examples.

The relationship of these systems to natural structures and self-organized structures in nature in the spirit of Frei Otto, as well as the morphological combinability of the systems according to Heino Engel, are also discussed.

The focus and subject of the model-based examination project in the winter semester 2026/27 are modular, foldable, bending-active, and double-layer gridshells.