The Magic of Tents: Transforming Space

by Alejandro Bahamón

For years, architects have enjoyed the challenge of incorporating lightweight structures -- fabrics, tents, canopies, membranes, and so on -- into their designs.Such materials are a welcome boon to architectural creativity, allowing designers to envision spaces that take innovative shapes and interact with their surroundings in ways unattainable with conventional materials. Recent years have seen an increase in the use of such structures, in part because advances in computer technology have made it easier to render and model such projects, and in part because such structures are ideally suited to today's increasing concerns about environmentalism and sustainability.

The Magic of Tents showcases innovative uses of lightweight, tented structures from across the United States and around the world -- from an Arizona school to an Istanbul bank, from a Miami nightclub on the beach to a private home in Germany, from corporate headquarters in Los Angeles to offices in Oslo, and many more! The book features both residential and commercial projects, projects with both exterior and interior usages, projects where the tented element is the driving component of the design, and projects that incorporate lightweight structures to accent or address a specific need.

Endlessly flexible, nurturing of creativity, cost -- and energy-conscious, tented structures are an ideal means to address many concerns of modern architecture -- a creative means to not only define space, but also to transform it into something to meet all sorts of design needs, for projects both grand and small.

176 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2004

About the author

Alejandro Bahamón, an architect, photographer, and editor of architecture books, is the author of numerous publications on contemporary architecture, including Sketch Plan Build, The Magic of Tents, Treehouses, Glass Houses, Houses on the Edge, and (with Ana María Álvarez), Light Color Sound. He lives in Barcelona.