Buro Happold is one of the world’s leading specialists in the design of custom-built fabric (or tensile) structures. These inspiring and often dramatic buildings combine functionality with beautiful aesthetics to create out-of-the-ordinary spaces that are equally at home in a wide variety of environments and locations, from deserts and polar climates to city centres and waterfronts.

Buro Happold has worked on many high profile projects, including the award-winning Millennium Dome in Greenwich, the largest structure of its kind in the world. Economical, sustainable and built to a high performance standard, our lightweight structures are designed to be unique in their own right. They have been used as exhibition spaces, sports stadia, retail outlets, music pavilions and performance arenas.

Working in partnership with fabric contractors, we provide a complete and detailed fabrication design to enable the manufacture of the supporting structure, connections and membrane surfaces. To meet the unique technical challenges, specialist tools have been developed to assist in the design of special structure buildings, including Tensyl, an in-house software suite which enables us to model fabric, cable-net, pneumatic and non-linear structural systems.

Buro Happold’s special structures engineers frequently work on international projects
as part of a multi-disciplinary design team. To create the often spectacular designs we draw on a wide range of high-tech structures and materials, including air inflated structures, high tensile cable nets and trusses, lightweight concrete, intricate steelwork, structural glazing, tensioned fabric and timber gridshells.