In this episode of “On Lightness” I am talking to Dr. Christoph Gengnagel, who is both partner at Bollinger+Grohmann Engineers and professor and researcher at the architecture and urbanism department of the UdK Berlin. We talk about the beauty of lightness, how it can be researched and how it can be really hard to implement it as a construction practitioner.

This episode was moderated and produced by Leon Hidalgo.

The following article is meant as an informational extension of the podcast episode:

Christoph Gengnagel studied Civil Engineering in Weimar and later Architecture at the Technical University in Munich, where he discovered the beauty of lightweight structures. His doctoral dissertation is a thorough work on mobile membrane structures, which included a mobile grandstand that he worked on as part of a collaboration between the Technical University Munich, LSU of the University of Dundee and ARENA Ltd.

Following this work, through different research projects, he attempted to bridge the gap between research and real world applications but soon came to the realization that purely lightweight structures are hard to implement. One of these efforts was the Hybrid Tower / CITA, an active-bending structure. This was a collaboration between his chair KET at UdK and CITA at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, as well as A. Ferreira & Filhos

Although a lot of us admire both natural and nomadic structures and see them as prime examples of the beauty of lightness, Christoph understood that to serve all the complex functions of city living nowadays, he had to adjust his ideology of designing lightness to one of geometry-based weight reduction in existing systems. A more pragmatic approach was needed to actually help the building transition.

The properties of light were never a big factor in his work, although he thinks it should play a bigger role in architecture and engineering education. Remembering the reflection of light in caves, experienced as a kid, is a quality that’s hardly met by any of his built projects, he says. Stating that only some artists were able to work with light in a truly admirable way, partly because they don’t abide by building norms which counteract beauty.

Finally, we talked about Dr. Gengnagels’ current research on reducing mass in ceiling systems,

about his passion for cycling as a means of feeling lightness.

and about the one time he felt a built work was embodying lightness. On the construction site of the Bauhaus Archive Tower in Berlin.

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