A curved tower made entirely of straight lines. Two sets of lines lean opposite ways between rings, and the waist pulls in by itself, as in Shukhov's steel towers.
Vladimir Shukhov, 1896 and 1922
Take two rings, one above the other, and join them with straight rods, each rod leaning a little way round. Add a second set leaning the other way, and the rods cross in a lattice that pinches in at the middle: a hyperboloid of one sheet, a curved surface made only of straight lines. The Russian engineer Vladimir Shukhov saw what that meant for building.
Straight steel is cheap and easy to make, the crossings brace one another, and the result is light and very strong. He showed the first hyperboloid water tower at the Nizhny Novgorod fair in 1896 and went on to build some two hundred of them, followed by lighthouses, pylons and masts; cooling towers all over the world have the same shape for the same reason.
His masterpiece is the radio tower on Shabolovka Street in Moscow, finished in 1922 when steel was so short that his first design, 350 metres tall, had to come down to 160. It is six hyperboloids stacked one on another, each narrower than the one below, and its view from underneath, every line converging on the sky, is one of the great pictures of Constructivist design.
Every line drawn here is perfectly straight; the curves are the ones your eye makes from them. Turn the lines further round and the waist pulls in tighter.
Choose Looking up for the view from the foot of the tower. In motion the tower turns once on its axis.
Behind the mathematics
The first hyperboloid structures, 1896; the Shabolovka radio tower, 1922
Russian engineer who built the first hyperboloid structures, from water towers to the Shabolovka radio tower in Moscow, as well as thin steel shell roofs, pipelines and oil cracking plants.
