T-beam
Smithfield poulty market, London
Elliptical paraboloid concrete dome over Smithfield poultry market, London.
The Poultry Market is situated at the western end of Horace Jones's nineteenth century Smithfield Market building, and was built between 1961 and 1963 to replace a section of the original market that had been destroyed by a fire in 1958. The architect of the new building was T.P. Bennett and Son, and the engineer Ove Arup, with Povl Ahm the partner in charge.
The dome is an elliptical paraboloid, and the structural novelty of it was the use of prestressed edge beams to support it. This allowed the shell, seen from the inside, to seem to barely touch the walls at the point of contact in the corners, and made possible large segmental clerestory windows on all four sides to light the hall. It is the apparent lightness of the concrete shell (8 cm thick over most of the area of the dome) and the delicacy with which it rests on the building that still amazes people today.
Although the dome was probably the largest shell concrete structure in Europe at the time it was completed, the real technical achievement was its shallowness. The rise of the dome is roughy 9 meters, whereas normally a dome of this size would have had a rise of 15m; no dome so flat had previously been built anywhere in the world. The reason for keeping it low was to prevent if from being too prominent from the outside, otherwise it would have overpowered Jones's buildings
Smithfield poulty market, London
Elliptical paraboloid concrete dome over Smithfield poultry market, London.
The Poultry Market is situated at the western end of Horace Jones's nineteenth century Smithfield Market building, and was built between 1961 and 1963 to replace a section of the original market that had been destroyed by a fire in 1958. The architect of the new building was T.P. Bennett and Son, and the engineer Ove Arup, with Povl Ahm the partner in charge.
The dome is an elliptical paraboloid, and the structural novelty of it was the use of prestressed edge beams to support it. This allowed the shell, seen from the inside, to seem to barely touch the walls at the point of contact in the corners, and made possible large segmental clerestory windows on all four sides to light the hall. It is the apparent lightness of the concrete shell (8 cm thick over most of the area of the dome) and the delicacy with which it rests on the building that still amazes people today.
Although the dome was probably the largest shell concrete structure in Europe at the time it was completed, the real technical achievement was its shallowness. The rise of the dome is roughy 9 meters, whereas normally a dome of this size would have had a rise of 15m; no dome so flat had previously been built anywhere in the world. The reason for keeping it low was to prevent if from being too prominent from the outside, otherwise it would have overpowered Jones's buildings