Candela was pleased with the unique visual design of his support detail, where instead of a sharp V-shape, he formed it into a curve to give it continuity. To resist lateral thrusts, he linked adjacent footings with steel tie-bars, thus allowing the umbrella footings to carry only vertical loads. The V-beams are reinforced with steel, while the rest of the shell has only nominal reinforcing, not for added strength, but to address temperature effects and other properties of the concrete material that can cause cracking.Īt the supports, Candela anchored the V-beams into inverted umbrella footings, which cup the earth to prevent the shell from sinking into the soft Mexican soil. Structure and realisationĪs was his practice, at Xochimilco Candela used V-beams for groin stiffening, which was not visible, either from the inside or the outside, thus adding a bit of mystery to the educated observer of shell behavior. He had designed a few others before Xochimilco, but none so striking. The restaurant was not Candela's first groined vault. The groins are the valleys in the shell formed at the convergence of the intersecting hypars. Where the pavilion has two saddles, one in front of the other, the restaurant belongs to a type of shell structure called groined vaults.
The Cosmic Ray Pavilion, Candela's first hypar shell, has curved edges just like those of the restaurant in Xochimilco. The groined vault consists of four intersecting hypars, a structure that he had not yet attempted.
#Felix candela rib roof free
The form of the shell was a play of the hypar with free curved edges, that is, the edges of the shell are parabolic and free of any edge stiffeners that would conceal the thinness of the shell. Faber had made a rough sketch that somewhat resembled the final form of the restaurant Candela liked the idea, so he took it and redesigned it into a more graceful shape. Recently, formal influences of his innovations can be found in works by Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Ali (Azerbaijan, 2013), FOA’s Yokohama Terminal (Japan, 2002), and UNstudio’s Burnham Pavilion (Chicago, 2009).įélix Candela's Concrete Shells: An Engineered Architecture for México and Chicago is a collaboration between the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).ĭownload the information related to this event here.Candela's stimulus for the form of Los Manantiales Restaurant in Xochimilco, Mexico City came from Colin Faber, who was working with Candela at Cubiertas Ala. In Chicago’s built environment, parallels to Candela’s work can be seen in the experiments with concrete architecture of the 1960s, including Walter Netsch’s UIC Campus and Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City. Famous Candela structures include the Pavilion of Cosmic Rays at UNAM, Mexico City (1951) the Chapel Lomas de Cuernavaca, Cuernavaca (1958) Los Manantiales Restaurant, Xochimilco (1958) and the Palace of Sports for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. These curved and cantilevered forms were not only structural advancements but also brought new textural and atmospheric qualities to the social and communal spaces they shelter. His designs evolved as feats of architectural engineering, using hyperbolic paraboloid geometry to create numerous reinforced concrete shells. In the 1950s, ten years into his practice in Mexico, Candela debuted his experimental signature shell structures by designing a continuous curved surface of minimal thickness. The exhibition spotlights Félix Candela’s Concrete Shells through photographs, architectural models, and plans, as well as archival material from his time as a professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1971 to 1978.Ĭandela exiled to Mexico at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, where he lived for thirty years and established his career as an architect.
It originated through the research of scholar Juan Ignacio del Cueto and is curated by the architectural theorist and designer Alexander Eisenschmidt. This exhibition roots Félix Candela (1910-1997) as one of the most prolific architects of the 20th century in his advanced geometric designs and lasting influence in contemporary architecture.
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