Stone and Steel

In my lovely dance with Calvin's Piety inspired by Space for God this summer, I ended up at the feet of Paul, and the floor he stood upon was stone, engraved with his words.

Oak Hills is no longer an outpost, a fort. It is an anchor of God's relationship with mankind. There is no need for more wood now. We need to be building for the next thousand years. We need to be building in stone, or concrete, and steel.

We surely should be recording our scripture in those stones, for the ages.

Concrete, early 21st Century

Photocatalysts are used to make a self-cleaning concrete, used by Richard Meier in the Vatican's 2003 Jubilee Church. It also cleans the air.

Links Here, here and here.

Giotto's Campanile

For cutaway schematics of the structure, go to this copyrighted page. First gathered these in March or so, an early exploration for a "Campanula" haha, wrong. Fun surfing for, lovely, and it helped me see that the one at Oak Hills might be twirling in a spiral. I don't ever see or get where the stairwell is, are there some inside the corner columns? The mechanics for getting to the top of what's in my head are sketchy and perhaps someone else can see the perfect expression.

Along the way I found provocative this jaunty, clear, ringing structure called Panch Mahal.

Spiraling towers

This promising site has some helpful visualizations of structure.

Aerial view

From PortlandMaps.com

Tent structure possibilities

Transparent membrane-cable tensile structure from BASE Structures.

Also from them, "Base structures sourced a high translucency silicon glass cloth, Atex 3000®, fabricated using special heat welding techniques, and this provided the client with a cost effective solution. "

Then there's the Denver Airport by Curtis Fentress. Greg mentioned these to me and I had forgotten that I'd seen these. A "catenary steel cable system", similar to the Brooklyn Bridge, supports a tensile fiberglass roof.

Following these phrases, I searched tensile structures in Portland, and found one designed by Tension Structures of Eide Industries out of California, who did a nice structure atop the parking building of Rasmussen BMW.