Catenary arches.

An exercise in creating and understanding catenary arches.

To form the arches, we suspended chain links of various lengths from the underside of a purpose built frame. Each chain was hung on hooks spaced across a grid of 10x10cm. Working at a scale of 1:25 we assumed four varying catenary arches, creating vaults within vaults. We wanted to make two versions of this system, one using traditional catenary curves to create the vaults, the other we attached chains onto chains, much like the Gaudi test model for the Sagrada Familia.

By dipping each individual chain, into melted wax, we were able to get four or five coats onto the chain before hanging it in it’s designated position on the grid. Reassembling was relatively easy compared to the varied catenary model where a new method of dipping the entire model into wax was used.

The result was hugely satisfying, watching what is essentially a completely slack object, become something that supported itself by means of a very weak setting agent like wax.

Lightweight vaults using gravity and fabric.

A similar idea to that of the chain link arch, was the following model tests with fabric and diluted pva glue.

Using the same frame that was used in the catenary arch model, a large sheet of cheese cloth was soaked in a very diluted bath of pva glue, pinned around the edges and points inside the grid and then hung upside down.

Once dried, the cloth was removed from the hanging table and turned upside down.

The way that such a simple process of allowing gravity to create these vaults was immensely satisfying and resulted in some interesting photographs.