Abseiling, seiling, over the bounding…

November 2, 2009 | Bruce N. Wright

I love discovering new words and digging into their meanings and origins. Tensioned fabric architecture has a wealth of unique words to discover, and like many new professions or technologies, the terminology is adapted from older technologies. Just as today’s automobiles began as “horseless carriages,” fabric architecture evolved from several technologies that contributed to its development, such as sailboat rigging, circus tents and Arab “black tents.”

The construction of tension structures also has its unique terms, such as abseiler. A term used chiefly in the UK and Germany — where much of the advancement of tension structure construction methods has occurred over the past 50 years — abseiler comes from the German abseilen, meaning to “rope down” or rappel down by means of a rope. According to Roger Frison-Rocheand and Sylvain Jouty in their History of Mountain Climbing (Paris, 1996), the origin of the term can be traced to Jean Estéril Charlet, a Chamonix guide who devised a method of roping down the French Alps summit Petit Dru in 1879.

The term abseiler when used in fabric architecture refers to the daring men (to date they are mostly men) who climb to the tops of large tension structure masts and cables to fasten fabric to the structure. And it takes the fearlessness of mountain climbers to safely climb the heights of some recent tension structures, such as Murphy/Jahn’s Sony Center in Berlin, where the peak of the cone-shaped roof rises up to 67m above the atrium floor. Abseilers made it possible to construct such a complex roof.

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