Excerpt from the “Journal of the National Institute of Building Sciences,” February 2016:
“The Swiss civil engineer and contractor Heinz Isler (1926-2009) is regarded as one of the pioneers of shell structures. He gained renown for his experimental, physical methods of form-finding and the resulting expressive shell structures produced in thin-walled concrete, and first triggered his lifelong fascination and professional work with such structures by draping a saturated bed sheet in freezing weather to form a catenary shell before inverting it. He proved that, what gravity forms when inverted, is resistant to the forces of gravity.