HOW STRUCTURES CAN CONTRIBUTE TO ARCHITECTURE

In the present century and near future the role of a structural engineer in man’s building activities may become far more important than it has been, since structural and constructional technologies will no doubt become more and more sophisticated and more specific to particularized disciplines, and it will become much harder for an architect to understand most of them. Toward the coming era a structural engineer should therefore train himself to gain ability of synthesizing related knowledge in different fields of engineering, besides ability in his major disciplines of engineering. He should also train himself to be able to help his architect understand in a conceptual way the most updated knowledge of related technologies. As a suggestion towards the above attempts, I try in the following to show how I have been endeavoring to enhance the overall values of man-made things in design of which I have been involved. In preparing the materials, I tried to select some of my works and rearrange them in order of hardness of material, starting from the hardest material, that I think is stone, and arriving at extremely soft material that is fabric without prestresses.