World Trade Center San Marino
Tensile wired canopy covering the car park
Architect
Norman Foster
Location
Dogana, Republic of San Marino
Year
2003
Client
Gecos SPA
Services
- Structural Design
- Construction Drawings
- Site supervision
Norman Foster
Dogana, Republic of San Marino
2003
Gecos SPA
The architect expressed the need for shading in the new car-park for the WTC in San Marino. Despite a standard and rigid structure, their wish was a tensile structure like a vineyard where grass could climb the ropes and spread all over the park area. For this regard we developed a project with over 10km of stainless steel ropes.
The car park roof consists of a tensile structure where the main structure is hot galvanized steel tubes topped with stainless steel spiral strands subjected to tension at their ends. The project has taken into account, moreover, of an adequate high enough pre-tension of ropes to ensure a certain rigidity of the net, but not too high in order to avoid burdensome constraints in the foundation. To this regard, some of the ropes that carry the forces down to ground are anchored directly to the foundation piles, which are of large diameter and depth.