April 12, 2019

Tent politics...

Politically, I think, Anglo/American pole tents and Eurotent halls are sort of right wing republican things. While pure tensile and fabric structures seem perfectly left wing Democrats. Both philosophies strive for some sort of esthetical economy, on the one hand, and idealistic perfection in forces on the other.
The first will never be beautiful; the second, beautiful but, not very useful. The idea of making a tenthall beautiful, is hopeless. The goal of making a naturally beautiful tensile structure practical, and economical is, I think, forever unattainable.

We stand for a different politic. Finding perfection rather boring, I seem to have wandered into a clearing in this forest of life to find a struggle raging between ying and yang, right and wrong, good and evil, white and black, in short, between opposites, more or less. To paraphrase the late great Bill Cooper, it's a battle that should never end; for if it ends we will have broken a sacred law of nature. There is no good without evil, how can we truly enjoy the good weather if we've never been through a storm. Light and shadow. One must have the other close at hand.
Concepts, ideas, designs, thoughts, welling up from the earth from a spring, best make their way through rocks and rubble of experience and fact, and finally out through intuition, to make us happy.

So, we've combined tension with tenthall, curves with straights, catenaries with beams. With perfection in mind, we are happy to not achieve it, if we've made people happy. We've gone the way of tensile tenthalls and impure tensegrities of 3-d membrane, cable, and frame construction.

All the while, being myself a lazy fellow, I muse on how someone with much better things to do than figure out our contraption, will know intuitively what to do with the pile of parts we shipped him.

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