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Vladimir Shukhov and the Invention of Hyperboloid Structures

Conference Paper · April 2005

DOI: 10.1061/40753(171)73

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ASCE / SEI 2005 Structures Congress

Vladimir Shukhov and the Invention of Hyperboloid Structures

Elizabeth C. English

LSU Hurricane Center, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803; PH 225
578 6019 or 504 717 5098; english@hurricane.lsu.edu

Abstract

Vladimir Shukhov was a brilliant structural engineer who lived and worked in
Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Besides the innovations he brought to
the oil industry and the construction of numerous bridges and buildings, he was the
inventor of a new family of doubly-curved structural forms. These forms, based on
non-Euclidean hyperbolic geometry, are known today as hyperboloids of revolution.
Shukhov developed not only many varieties of light-weight hyperboloid towers and
roof systems, but also the mathematics for their analysis. Unfortunately Shukhov’s
work is poorly known today, particularly in the West; however, his direct influence
may be seen in the work of two of the most important artist-architects of his time, as
well as, more recently, two Western engineers.

Introduction

Vladimir Grigorevich Shukhov (1853-1939) was unquestionably the premier

structural engineer in Russia of his time. The achievements of his wide-ranging
career included several patented inventions for the oil industry, the construction of
numerous buildings and contributions to the design of more than four hundred bridges
(Lopatto, 1951; Kovel'man, 1961). He created large light-weight (for the time) iron-
and-glass or glass-and-steel roofing systems for several of Moscow's most prominent
buildings. Among the best known of these are the barrel-vaulted roofs of the Upper
Trading Rows (now known as GUM) (Figure 1) and Petrovskii Passazh (Figure 2)
shopping arcades, where he used a system of very slender rods in tension, fanning
like cable stays, to provide lateral stability to the arches.

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Figure 1. Upper Trading Rows (GUM), Moscow, 1889-93, façade and interior
view.

Figure 2. Petrovskii Passazh, Moscow, 1903, façade and interior view.

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In the 1880s Shukhov began to work on the problem of the design of roof
systems to use a minimum of materials, time and labor, by “examining all the
theoretically possible solutions, to be followed by analytical calculations pertaining to
each.” (Graefe, 1990/1994, 12) His calculations were most likely derived from
mathematician Pafnutii Chebyshev’s work on the theory of best approximations of
functions, with which he would have been especially familiar.

Shukhov’s mathematical explorations of efficient roof structures led to his

invention of a new system that was innovative both structurally and spatially. By
applying his formidable mathematical skills to the problem of non-Euclidean surfaces
of negative double curvature, Shukhov succeeded in deriving a family of equations
that led not only to new structural and constructional systems, but to a new formal
vocabulary as well. These structures are now called hyperboloids of revolution or
hyperboloid structures, referring to the name "hyperbolic geometry" that Nikolai
Lobachevskii applied in the 1820s to his newly-invented non-Euclidean geometry.
Frei Otto has written that Shukhov’s hyperboloids are “generally regarded as the first
engineering surface structures in which roof membrane and structure form one unit.”
(Otto, 1973, 2:17)

The 1896 Nizhni-Novgorod Exposition

The hyperboloid roofs of the exhibition pavilions of the 1896 All-Russian

Industrial and Handicrafts Exposition in Nizhni-Novgorod, built by the Bari
Company with whom Shukhov spent most of his career, were the first publicly
prominent examples of Shukhov’s new system. Shukhov himself called them “metal
lace”. The roofs of these pavilions were doubly-curved surfaces formed of a lattice of
straight angle-iron and flat iron bars. The patent of this system, for which Shukhov
applied in 1895, was awarded in 1899 (Figure 3, 4a). Bari built two pavilions of this
type for the Nizhni-Novgorod Exposition, one oval in plan and one circular (Figure
4b).

Figure 3. Reticular Roof for a Building, elevation, from 1895 patent application.

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Figure 4. Reticular Roof for a Building, plan, from 1895 patent application;
Circular Exhibition Pavilion, Nizhni-Novgorod, 1896.

Shukhov also turned his attention to the development of an efficient and easily
constructed structural system for a tower carrying a large concentrated gravity load at
the top - the problem of the water tower. He wrote that his solution was inspired by
observing the action of a woven basket holding up a heavy weight. Again, it took the
form of a non-Euclidean surface of negative double curvature constructed of a light
network of straight iron bars and angle-iron. Shukhov's patent for an azhurnaia
bashnia (lattice tower) was submitted in 1896 and awarded in 1899. The hyperbolic
form of the tower is remarkably similar to that of the pseudosphere used since mid-
century to illustrate explanations of Lobachevskii's disproof of Euclid's parallel
postulate (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Lattice Tower, elevation and plan from 1896 patent application;
Pseudosphere illustrating Lobachevskii's hyperbolic geometry.

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Shukhov and the Bari Company built their first azhurnaia bashnia as a water
tower for the 1896 All-Russian Exposition. Over the next twenty years, Shukhov
designed more than two hundred of these towers, no two exactly alike, most with
heights in the range of 15m to 40m.

The Shabolovka Tower

At least as early as 1911, Shukhov began experimenting with the concept of

forming a tower out of stacked sections of hyperboloids. Stacking the sections
permitted the form of the tower to taper more at the top, with a less pronounced
“waist” between the shape-defining tension rings at bottom and top. Increasing the
number of sections would increase the tapering of the overall form, to the point that it
began to resemble a cone.

By 1918 Shukhov had developed this concept into the design of a nine-section
stacked hyperboloid radio transmission tower for Moscow. Shukhov designed a
350m tower, which would have surpassed the Eiffel Tower in height by 50m, while
using less than a quarter of the amount of material. His design, as well as the full set
of supporting calculations analyzing the hyperbolic geometry and sizing the network
of members, was completed by February of 1919; however, the 2200 tons of steel
required to build the tower to 350m were not available. In July 1919, Lenin decreed
that the tower should be built, but only to a height of 150m (Figure 6), and the
necessary steel was to be made available from the army’s supplies. Construction of

Figure 6. Comparison of Shabolovka Radio Tower and Eiffel Tower

(Shabolovka as designed, Eiffel Tower, Shabolovka as built).

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the smaller, 150m tower formed of six stacked reticulated hyperboloids began before
the end of the year. Each segment of the tower was assembled on the ground and
successively lifted into position, like the extension of the sections of a telescope. The
construction of Shukhov’s Shabolovka Radio Tower was completed by March of
1922 (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Shabolovka Radio Tower, Moscow, 1918-22, two views.

Empirical methods of structural analysis, or analysis based on the

experimental testing of material components, were the basis for the structural design
techniques used most widely in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. The use of more sophisticated methods of analysis for estimating the
stresses in indeterminate structures was not yet widespread. Shukhov developed the
mathematical techniques for producing the structural calculations necessary to design
the Shabolovka tower, which he most likely derived from the synthesis of
Lobachevskian geometry with Chebyshev’s work on minima, maxima and
approximations of functions. Shukhov is also credited with having developed
advanced graphic statics as another method of calculating forces in the structures he
was designing.

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Shukhov's Influence

The influence of Shukhov's work in his day was not confined to his own field
of engineering. His new forms, especially the Shabalovka tower, highly visible on
the Moscow skyline, caught the public's attention and became the subject of drawings,
cartoons and propaganda posters. Russian avant-garde artist Vladimir Tatlin's project
for the Monument to the Third International has become an internationally recognized
symbol of the Russian Revolution. The project's structure of long, slender, obliquely-
crossed bars made obvious reference to Shukhov's towers, as did Tatlin's proposal
that his iconic monument be constructed to a height of 400m (Figures 8a, 5a, 7b).
Tatlin's insistance that this was feasible implies his knowledge of Shukhov's original
design for the 350m Shabolovka Tower (English, 2000).

Figure 8. Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1920, model;

Konstantin Melnikov, Melnikov House, Moscow, 1927-29.

Shukhov was the designer of the light-weight roof systems for avant-garde
architect Konstantin Melnikov's industrial buildings. In the house Melnikov designed
for himself and his family, we can see the similarity of the pattern of the windows
with the unusually shaped windows of Shukhov's Circular Pavilion for the Nizhni-
Novgorod Exposition (Figures 8b, 4b).

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More recently, the French engineer Robert Le Ricolais studied Shukhov's

work in conjunction with his theoretical and experimental investigations of forms of
idealized structures which would use the minimum possible amount of material
required to support a given load (Le Ricolais, 1973). His tests of intricately cable-
braced long columns and long-span beams were carried out at the University of
Pennsylvania in the 1960s (Figure 9a).

In the late 1980s Joerg Schlaich investigated the adaptation of Shukhov's

system of hub-connected fanned tension-rod bracing to the design of modern light-
weight glass roof systems (Schlaich, 1999). The glass roofs of the Mineral Spa at
Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt and the courtyard of the renovated Museum of the History of
Hamburg (Figure 9b) were designed using these new systems (Holgate, 1997).
Schlaich also in part attributes the shape of his Killesberg Lookout Tower in Stuttgart
to his familiarity with Shukhov's towers.

Figure 9. Robert Le Ricolais, Funicular polygon of revolution, 1962; Joerg

Schlaich, Museum of the History of Hamburg, 1988, hub connection.

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References

English, Elizabeth Cooper (2000). Arkhitektura i mnimosti: the origins of Soviet

avant-garde rationalist architecture in the Russian mathematical and mystical-
philosophical intellectual tradition, Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

Graefe, Rainer, Murat Grappoev and Ottmar Pertschi, eds. (1990). Vladimir G.
Shukhov, 1853-1939: die kunst der sparsamen konstruktion. Deutsche Verlags-
Anstalt.

Graefe, Rainer, Murat Gappoev, and Ottmar Pertschi, eds. (1994). V. G. Shukhov
1853-1939 : iskusstvo konstruktsii. Moscow: Mir.

Holgate, Alan (1997). The art of structural engineering : the work of Joerg Schlaich
and his team. Stuttgart: Ed. Axel Menges.

Le Ricolais, Robert (1973). "'Things Themselves Are Lying, and So Are Their
Images'." In Structures implicit and explicit : Via 2, ed. James Bryan and Rolf Sauer,
81-109. Philadelphia: Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania.

Lopatto, A. E. (1951). Pochetnyi akademik Vladimir Grigor'evich Shukhov :

vydaiushchiisia russkii inzhener. Moscow: Izd-vo akademii nauk SSSR.

Kovel'man, G. M. (1961). Tvorchestvo pochetnogo akademika inzhenera Vladimira

Grigor'evicha Shukhova. Moscow: Gos. izd-vo literatury po stroitel'stvy i
arkhitekture.

Otto, Frei, Rudolf Trostel, and Friedrich Karl Schleyer (1973). Tensile structures :
design, structure, and calculation of buildings of cables, nets, and membranes.
Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Schlaich, Joerg (1999). Conversation with the author, Princeton, NJ, 24 March.

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