The concrete vault of Club Táchira in Caracas

Abstract

In the summer of 1955, the Venezuelan architect Fruto Vivas met up with the engineer Eduardo Torroja in Costillares (Madrid) in order to propose collaborating on the design of a roof. The form of the shell did not come to Torroja in a complete form, but rather he had to approach it based on discussions with the author. The previous design was the sinuous form, which would be generated by a pair of curves. One a curved directrix of a warped trigonometric line, and the other a flat catenary, which moves parallel to itself with the vertex always, situated above the curved directrix. The complex process of the design and the details of the project are explained in detail as well as the complex reduced model build to test the analytical calculus. After all we have compared the original outputs that Torroja obtained wit the results of a Finite Element Method. The conclusions can been summarized in the difficulty of establish a direct correspondence between both methods.