Bernard Vaudeville Bernard Vaudeville was trained both as an engineer and as an architect. At the Atelier Piano where he started his professional life, he had the opportunity to meet Peter Rice and subsequently joined his team at RFR. The company, created by Rice with Martin Francis and Ian Ritchie, aims to develop a unique approach that closely combines technology and architecture. With RFR, Bernard Vaudeville has been involved in key projects such as the 2F Terminal at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport, the Nuage under the Grande Arche at Paris-La Défense, a small stadium recently finished in Nanterre which makes innovative use of wood, and the footbridge to be built across the river Seine, between the new French National Library and the Bercy Park in central Paris. These projects will illustrate the basis of his presentation. Alongside his work at RFR, he has been teaching for over 10 years in university architectural and engineering departments at Nancy, Nanterre and Marne-la-Vallée. Since 1999, he has also served as Head of the Civil and Structural Engineering department at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, Paris. One of his roles has been to restructure and give a new direction to the Civil Engineering curriculum by increasing the focus on technical design and environmental issues.

Steel and Glass Roofs

In contrast to the accelerating trend towards standardisation, structures are increasingly confronted with situations of ever greater complexity.

Constructions are required to incorporate new functions in order to respond to more sophisticated demands in terms of usage, environment, comfort, etc. They also form part of an intricate and interlocking environment, of which big cities, with their interweaving systems of housing, industry, offices, infrastructures, equipment and communication networks are the most obvious examples. Each of these systems has its own diverging logic, often conflictual when put into practice on the ground. The situation sometimes becomes so entangled that simple structural solutions no longer suffice.

In order to deal with this complexity and to untie these knots, structural schemes must respond to odd geometries, difficult support conditions and a melange of materials.

Today’s engineering has no emblematic raw material that characterises its era, in the way that the use of iron in the late 19th century and concrete in the first half of the 20th century become synonimous with progress in structural design. What distinguishes engineering today is the profusion of materials and indeed, the erosion of the very concept of material, as the distinction between materials, structure and envelope becomes ever more blurred.

More complex and less articulated, structures are themselves becoming simili-materials: impure, hybrid systems in which mass, line and surface are intermingled.

If we leave aside the question of ultra-long spans, the structural challenge now resides less in discovering new genotypes than in manipulating the already well-known structural gene pool. Examples from RFR projects will show how the proposed schemes resulted from a harsh negociation between structural concerns on the one hand and geometrical, budgetary, fabrication, material and assembly constraints on the other.