Dorton Arena

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Dorton Arena
JS Dorton Arena with main entrance

JS Dorton Arena with main entrance

Data
place Raleigh
architect Maciej Nowicki , William Henley Deitrich
Architectural style Modern
Construction year 1951-1952
height 27.4 m
Floor space 92 × 97 m²
particularities
Free-hanging roof with a double-curved ceiling
Fun fair - Dorton Arena in the background

The JS Dorton Arena (or Paraboleum ) is a multi-purpose building with 7610 seats in Raleigh in the US state of North Carolina on the fairgrounds of the North Carolina State Fair . The Dorton Arena is the first large structure in architectural history with a free-hanging roof. The roof arches in the form of a saddle surface or a hyperbolic paraboloid shell . The building was opened for the trade fair in October 1952 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 11, 1973 as a National Historic Monument . Originally the hall was called State Fair Arena , in 1961 it was renamed in honor of the director of the North Carolina State Fair and its client Joseph Sibley Dorton (1895-1961).

In the professional world, the Dorton Arena is regarded as an aesthetically successful unit of function and form. The hall had a major influence on the development of lightweight construction and is therefore visited by people interested in architecture from all over the world.

Building history

The North Carolina State Fair director and former veterinarian JS Dorton wanted a multi-purpose building for the annual agricultural fair in October that he wanted to have designed like an " amphitheater ". Not only should there be seasonal cattle demonstrations and auctions, but also industrial fairs and sporting events throughout the year. He commissioned Maciej Nowicki for the construction , who in turn hired his friend, the architect William Henley Deitrich, as local contact architect. The Polish architect and urban planner Nowicki had already participated in international building projects and had been at the School of Design at what was then North Carolina State College in Raleigh since 1948 , where he headed the Faculty of Architecture. He drew around a hundred designs for this hall before he was killed in a plane crash in Egypt in 1950 before construction began.

Deitrich decided to use Nowicki's sketches as a basis and brought in further consultants and project partners. A close friend of Deitrich, the New York civil engineer Fred Severud, was asked to calculate the difficult statics of the Dorton Arena . Severud was known for his openness to innovative constructions. Nowicki's widow and architect Stanisława (Siasia) gave the architects useful tips for the construction of the planned building.

Many design details had to be solved for the first time in this pioneering work. The two paraboloidal arches that support the suspended roof cross at the edge of the roof at a height of 7.9 m and stabilize each other by connecting the ends of the steel arches with horizontal tension cables in the ground. The exact location of these underground tension ropes was determined with the help of the first computer. The tensile force of the two steel arches therefore not only supports the roof, the arches also support each other. Supporting columns or walls are no longer necessary here. In front of the crossing points of the two arches, Severud integrated two hinges each, in order to be able to compensate for movements of the edge arches.

The suspended roof consists of a network of steel cables that are initially attached to the edge arches in a rectangular pattern. The calculations assumed 16 pounds per square foot of wind suction on the roof, but it was found to withstand only six pounds per square foot. Therefore, the prestressing steel net was strengthened with additional tensioning cables in a diagonal orientation. In a roof model with adjustable springs and a weight display, Severud determined the weight with which the tensioning cables had to be pre-tensioned in order to minimize the expansion of the roof due to wind and temperature fluctuations. The roof withstood the first real stress test by Hurricane Hazel in 1954 at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour. Metal plates were used over the insulation material as a roof covering. For cost reasons, Nowicki's design of the facade was reduced to a minimum.

reception

Ingalls Ice Arena, New Haven , Connecticut, 1956-58

The Dorton Arena served many architects and civil engineers from Germany and abroad as a stimulus for identical and similar buildings. This resulted in a recovery of the developed lightweight construction , in which not only hanging roofs, but later reversed suspended roofs as domes (Engl. Dome ) were applied such. B. the Astrodome in Houston or the Millennium Dome in London. As further examples, Sprague cites the Ingalls ice rink at Yale University (1956–58) by Eero Saarinen and Fred Severud, the Washington State Coliseum (1962), the Yoyogi National Sports Hall for the 1964 Olympic Games by Kenzo Tange and Yoshikatsu Tsuboi and that New York State Pavilion (1964) by Philip Johnson .

The Dorton Arena also made a strong impression on the then architecture student Frei Otto , who was able to study the building model and the construction drawings of the hall during the planning phase in Severud's engineering office. He was so impressed by the simplicity and elegance of the structure that he devoted his later professional life entirely to researching and applying lightweight construction . His dissertation used a photo of the Dorton Arena as a cover picture , Otto's suspended roof structures such as the German pavilion for the world exhibition Expo 67 in Montreal and the Olympic Park in Munich became world famous.

In Europe, the Berlin Congress Hall by Hugh Stubbins and Fred Severud has become the most famous of all suspended roof structures. Further successor buildings to the Dorton Arena are the transmitter building of Europe 1 in Felsberg-Berus (1954), the Feierabendhaus Knapsack (1957) in Hürth , the Auditoire Paul-Emile Janson auditorium (1956) of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), the sports hall Športová hala Pasienky (1958) in Bratislava , the ice arena ( Ice Aréna ) in Prešov, Slovakia (1965), Ulrich Müthers Teepott in Rostock - Warnemünde (1968) and the Beverwijk Sporthal in Beverwijk (1971). Frei Otto judged these successors: “For a long time the Raleigh Arena was the most important construction in the field of wide-span cable network structures. It has been imitated in many similar designs, but none of them are comparable to the original in terms of quality. "

Another development are buildings with hyperbolic-parabolic suspended roofs, which transfer the tensile force of the prestressing steel in the roof ceiling to the steel girders along the retaining walls. Examples are the Black Forest Hall (1953) in Karlsruhe, the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum (1965) or the Plavecký Stadium (1971) in České Budějovice in South Bohemia .

Awards (selection)

  • 1953: Engineering Gold Medal from The Architectural League of New York
  • 1953: First Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA)
  • In 1957, the American Institute of Architects selected the Dorton Arena as one of the ten buildings expected to have the greatest impact on future American architecture.

Literature (selection)

Movie

  • Dorton Arena. Documentary, USA, 2014, 10 min., Script and director: Our State Magazine (North Carolina), production: UNC-TV, Internet publication : July 15, 2014, online video with archive and flight robot recordings, table of contents with photos from ArchDaily.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c V.F. Arcaro: Construction dates and photos of the Dorton Arena. In: Institute for Membrane and Shell Technologies (IMS) / Anhalt University .
  2. ↑ Scott Huler: The Big Chip: Dorton Arena. In: Our State , September 25, 2013.
  3. ^ Rainer Barthel: Laudation on the occasion of the award of an honorary doctorate to Frei Otto. ( Memento of the original from May 18, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lt.ar.tum.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: TU Munich , Faculty of Architecture , May 25, 2005, (PDF; 10 p., 96 KB).
  4. ^ A b Dorton Arena Construction / State Fairgrounds. In: NCSU Libraries , accessed May 28, 2016.
  5. ^ Tyler Sprague: Eero Saarinen, Eduardo Catalano and the Influence of Matthew Nowicki: A Challenge to Form and Function. In: Nexus Network Journal , Vol. 12, No. May 2, 2010.
  6. ↑ Sprague, "Floating Roofs," p. 1096.
  7. ↑ Sadia Quddus: Video: JS Dorton Arena, the Fairground Pavilion That Was a Modernist Marvel. In: ArchDaily , September 4, 2014, statement in the video.
  8. ↑ a b c d e f g h Henry Petroski: Dorton Arena. In: American Scientist , Vol. 90, November / December 2002, p. 503–507, (PDF; 80 KB), HTML version. ( Memento from May 25, 2016 in the Internet Archive ).
  9. ↑ Sprague, "Floating Roofs," p. 1096.
  10. ↑ a b J. S. Dorton Arena. In: National Park Service , accessed May 28, 2016.
  11. ^ Sprague, "Floating Roofs," 1101.
  12. ^ Sprague, "Floating Roofs," 1101.
  13. ^ Sprague, "Floating Roofs," 1100.
  14. ^ Tyler Sprague: Eero Saarinen, Eduardo Catalano and the Influence of Matthew Nowicki: A Challenge to Form and Function. In: Nexus Network Journal , Vol. 12, No. 2, May 2010, p. 251:
    "... substantial design changes due to budget and construction issues altered the building to the point where some questioned if Nowicki would have been pleased with it ..."
  15. ↑ Sprague, "Floating Roofs," p. 1096.
  16. ↑ Sprague, "Floating Roofs," 1102.
  17. ↑ Cover picture: Frei Otto: The hanging roof (1954). In: ZVAB , accessed on May 13, 2019.
  18. ↑ Bâtiment J auditoire Paul-Emile Janson et salle Van Buren. In: irismonument.be , accessed on May 28, 2016.
  19. ↑ Picture gallery: Športová hala Pasienky v Bratislave photo album. In: asb.sk ; Aerial view. In: ba.foxy.sk ; Sports Hall Pasienky. ( Memento from May 25, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). In: bratislavaguide.com , (English).
  20. ^ Koichiro Ishikawa: Zimný štadión (Ice Stadium). In: University of Fukui , Aloss - Album of Spatial Structures , accessed on May 28, 2016.
    Picture gallery: Sedlová plocha (hyperbolický paraboloid). In: mdg.vsb.cz , accessed on May 28, 2016.
  21. ^ Koichiro Ishikawa: Sporthal Beverwijk. In: University of Fukui , Aloss - Album of Spatial Structures , accessed May 28, 2016.
  22. ↑ Otto quoted from Sprague, “Floating Roofs” , p. 1102: “For a long time the Raleigh Arena was the most important structure in the field of large-span cable-net structures. It was imitated in many similar designs, none comparable with the original in quality. "
  23. ^ Swimming pool in České Budějovice. Plavecký stadium in České Budějovice. In: bbkult.net , Centrum Bavaria Bohemia (German, Czech), accessed on May 13, 2019.
      Plavecký stadion. In: City of České Budějovice , accessed on May 28, 2016.