How Upside-Down Models Revolutionized Architecture

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_Description_
Some of the world's most beautiful buildings were designed upside down. Literally. In this video, we explore how architects and engineers like Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Antonio Gaudi, and Heinz Isler used gravity-defying models to solve complex structural challenges. From St. Paul’s Cathedral to the Sagrada Familia, these innovative techniques have shaped architecture for centuries.
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_About the Channel_
Architecture with Stewart is a KZbin journey exploring architecture’s deep and enduring stories in all their bewildering glory. Weekly videos and occasional live events breakdown a wide range of topics related to the built environment in order to increase their general understanding and advocate their importance in shaping the world we inhabit.
_About Me_
Stewart Hicks is an architectural design educator that leads studios and lecture courses as an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also serves as an Associate Dean in the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts and is the co-founder of the practice Design With Company. His work has earned awards such as the Architecture Record Design Vanguard Award or the Young Architect’s Forum Award and has been featured in exhibitions such as the Chicago Architecture Biennial and Design Miami, as well as at the V&A Museum and Tate Modern in London. His writings can be found in the co-authored book Misguided Tactics for Propriety Calibration, published with the Graham Foundation, as well as essays in MONU magazine, the AIA Journal Manifest, Log, bracket, and the guest-edited issue of MAS Context on the topic of character architecture.
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FOLLOW me on instagram: @stewart_hicks & @designwithco
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University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture: arch.uic.edu/
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Stock video and imagery provided by Getty Images, Storyblocks, and Shutterstock.
Music provided by Epidemic Sound
#architecture #urbandesign

[@fungt89]

My tutor said that prior to the understanding of these curves as models for arches, domes etc.. architects and engineers were pretty much just guessing and using the trial and error of previous completed works that were still standing. Which makes all the ancient architecture even more impressive.

[@mrs.manrique7411]

I remember that trial and error was taught in mathematics. Before we’d get into the elegant calculations, we’d have to guess with trial and error, inelegant, calculations. 😍

[@noaccount4]

Yeah. Even with the ancient pyramids there were a lot of failed pyramids before they got good at making pyramids. Some of them still survive today with the awkward stopgap measures they installed

[@BooBaddyBig]

They had a bunch of rules of thumb that worked though, but structures were heavier than they needed to be.

[@CycloidalHeadache]

You don’t think that’s how the curves were found as well? That’s the basis of learning anything.

[@ericwright8592]

Thousands of years of trial and error can achieve amazing results. That's basically all accumulated human knowledge.

[@jerrysstories711]

Thing is, the top of a stone arch and the bottom of a hanging catenary chain are under a lot less compression/tension than the arch's base or the chain's anchor points. So if an architect wants to make the top of the arch lighter, as it should be, he has to model it with a chain that's proportionally lighter in the middle. So this design technique is far more complicated than people realize.

[@chaboii]

That's actually extra concerning because the models will have greater compressive/tensile forces, right? The models provide an ideal case, never what you want to work from...

[@tonylarose4842]

I've heard similar things from early house rafters were based on upside down boat hulls. Woodworkers were really good at building boats and were able to do both in a similar way.

[@MrVorpalsword]

oo well, not sure, do you know what the central axis from east to west is called in a church, the bit with the highest roof?

[@kateapple1]

YOURE A BOT

[@kateapple1]

@@MrVorpalswordyou’re not a bot so you’re ok 👍 😂😂 but you’re talking to one

[@MrVorpalsword]

@@kateapple1 well anyway, the central part of a church is called a nave, and that is because the roof looks like an upturned boat hull. Nave meaning boat in Latin, from which we get words like Navy, navigate etc. So I think that is where Tony got his story a little bit muddled ... though you still get shelters and the odd house on a beach made from an upturned rowing boat sometimes.

[@refindoazhar1507]

​@@kateapple1what's the reason you think they are a bot?

[@hape3862]

The new Stuttgart train station follows a similar principle. Here, the architect looked for the smallest possible surface area with a film of soap water that forms on a wire frame. This in turn was used for supports and light eyes in the underground station.

[@bc_v01]

Yess, I think it looks awesome! The idea is from Frei Otto, he also designed the Olympiapark in Munich

[@motogoa]

The idea of icing a burlap rag is just ... well, genious!

[@CopenhagenDreaming]

Siza's pavillion for the 1998 World Exhibition is kind of an extension of Gaudí's work; he made a seemingly impossible arch by suspending a sheet of concrete over a large plaza. Upside-down engineering that remained upside-down. A very different end result, but a very similar design process. (Just with a lot of much more advanced engineering; it takes a LOT to make such a thin sheet of concrete!)

[@GM-qq1wi]

I had to google it after reading your comment. Never heard of it before, but wow, it's quite impressive. The concrete sheet itself looks so bouncy and soft, it kinda reminds me of that split second when a bedsheet hovers above the bed before falling.

[@paulgrassart8935]

Thanks, I did not know this building. It is way more impressive than that : since it is kept upsidedown, it means it works in tension. But it is made of concrete, which works only in compression. So that means they found a way to build a lot of tension in a preconstrained structure while keeping it such a thin veil. It would have been easier to use it as a dome (well, let's say 'less difficult'). The result is stunning. Great piece of design and engineering.

[@2Cerealbox]

I always love it when people are able to solve problems by taking the idea and flipping it on its head.

[@gindphace]

Shame they couldn’t build it upside down too, and flip it over upon completion.

[@davidswanson5669]

If I was strong enough, I’d gladly flip the current monstrosity end over end (the basilica).

[@YourCapyFrenBigly_3DPipes1999]

Ha ha lool

[@XeroKimorimon]

Build it in Australia, then ship it to NA or EU and you've successfully built it upside down and flipped it after completion

[@Hannah_Em]

I adore catenary curves (and catenoid and also hyperboloid) surfaces in architecture/engineering, there's something deeply elegant about them which speaks to me. Some of my favourite minecraft structures that I've built over the years used catenary (cosh) curves, or catenoid and hyperboloid surfaces (typically not done by hand; with tools like e.g. the worldedit plugin, you can generate shapes based on a mathematical formula you give it), but I had no idea about the real-world architectural history of how these shapes were created!

[@AbhishekBlessonManuelAlexSahay]

Great video, Stewart! Just a quick correction: at 5:20, you mention the model being made by Antoni Gaudí. However, the model you're referring to was actually done by Frei Otto, the German architect and structural engineer. Gaudí’s original model was unfortunately destroyed. Frei Otto's work in lightweight structures and tensile architecture was definitely inspired by Gaudí, though! Keep up the fantastic content!

[@ttopero]

This might be the best explanation about how a structural architect thinks compared with a traditional architect. As architects, we still have to know what structural architects and engineers do, but not to the detail or complexity they should.

[@barryrobbins7694]

This video gives a whole new perspective on the Sagrada Família. It is well known that cathedrals are designed to reach toward heaven (God). In this case, it is as if Sagrada Família is being pulled by God the Father. It’s a beautiful concept even if one is not religious.

[@christopherstephenjenksbsg4944]

Fascinating! This reminds me of the work of the late Robert Mark, a professor of civil engineering and architecture at Princeton. He used photoelastic modeling to analyse the structure of ancient buildings, like Gothic cathedrals and Renaissance domes, including St Paul's. He would make structural models in plastic, hang them upside down, add weights at critical junctures, and then heat the models up enough so that they would deform slightly. Using holographic interferometry, he would pinpoint areas of stress or structural failure. This process illustrated in detail why some of these buildings still stood, while others failed, or at least were problematic. I was also reminded of several other Renaissance-period domes, which ended up taking on a distinctly pointed or ogival profile for structural reasons. Brunelleschi's dome on the Duomo in Florence is the earliest example I can think of. Michaelangelo's original design for the dome of St Peter's in Rome had a semi-circular profile, but when the dome was completed after Michaelangelo's death by Giacomo della Porta and Domenico Fontana, they altered the dome's semi-circular profile, so it now has the profile of a catenary arch, much like the arches of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia. Even Wren's dome at St Paul's has a catenary arch hidden in its section -- a brick cone in the form of a catenary arch that is hidden by a low interior semi-circular dome and an exterior dome of timber and lead. I don't know if any of these architects hung structural models upside down like Gaudi, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did.

[@michaelimbesi2314]

It’s amazing that somebody is finally completing Gaudi’s cathedral. Perhaps some of the lessons learned during the construction can be disseminated into the rest of the architectural profession so that the architects who were only taught by members of the Cold War-era Modernist orthodoxy can learn how to build buildings in the style of the more artsy, aesthetically-driven styles that came from the generations before that. Perhaps the entire profession could manage to recover a lot of the knowledge that was lost in that era.

[@TessHKM]

Everyone wants fancy neoclassical ornate maximalism architecture, nobody wants to pay fancy neoclassical ornate maximalism consulting fees

[@glennmckenzie1096]

Such an inspiring episode - arohanui! Feel really emotional that a fellow Kiwi from so far geographically and culturally away could contribute to such an outstanding piece of Spanish architecture. I visited last in 2010 and hope to see it again before I die.

[@caspenbee]

This is so damn clever. When you see it, it's intuitive -- but it takes a really flexible mind to notice it in the first place.

[@lonesock]

I saw something very similar in the oil and gas industry once. Mooring an oil rig offshore can require dozens of anchor lines and risers (the pipes that bring the oil and gas up from the well), and ensuring those catenaries don't clash with each other is hard to visualize even on a computer screen. It gets even more complicated during installation, as lines are being laid down and picked up by boats on the surface. So this one older engineer's solution was to take a big room in his office building and make a model of the anchor layout with string. The boat models were placed on model railways mounted upside down on the ceiling and had remote-controlled winches. In this way, he designed every phase of installation and the final design intuitively. For fun he had a model-scale Eifel tower on the floor/seabed: it was 10 inches high, whereas the anchor lines went about 15ft to the ceiling.

[@nacoran]

I wonder if you could make a negative model using the hanging model. You wouldn't want to dip it, because that would introduce pressure from buoyancy, but maybe something that could deposit on it slowly. Edit... doh, like freezing it... I guess I should wait until the end of the video to make my comments!

[@trapjohnson]

YOu too, huh? ;)

[@migrantfamily]

The fact that Sir Cristopher Wren was too radical for his time sort of blows my mind. Also, a very nice fact to have to serve those who oppose anything that’s “new”. As Peter Gabriel puts it, all these old things “were once just a thought/in somebody’s mind.” Perhaps for something to become a “classic”, it has to started out as revolutionary. There’s no shortage of examples to support this hypothesis!

[@rob-merica]

Just here for the Peter Gabriel reference.

[@Nostalg1a]

Opposing some new things can be good. There’s no shortage of examples to support this hypothesis

[@CazTanto]

I was coming to make a similar point. So what I'll add is this: To think now St Paul's is at the centre of 8 of Londons 13 protected sight-lines. In a number of cases it has literally defined the architecture of other buildings, by necessity that they do not block views of St Paul's.

[@migrantfamily]

Obviously, not all new things are great. But all great things have been new.

[@marsco2442]

Not every great thing ever was new. Language was never new, it evolved, and same with classical architecture like st Paul's which was very similar to st peters basilica, which itself was the pantheon over basilica of maxentius. Many great things are only changed 1 percent many many times, and never were new because they were never at one point invented, but rather evolved.

[@TheBrokenEclipse]

This was insanely interesting - thanks for sharing this!

[@user-o4x4d]

It's actually a very delicate balance to get those molecules into the right arrangement.

[@christophermahon1851]

This was incredibly interesting. And I have just added seeing the Sagrada Familia to my bucket list. Thanks!

[@hypermetaphori]

Amazing work Stewart. You are a model of great KZbin architectural content. As an architect who worshipped Gaudi as a student, I was inspired to try and apply his style to my projects. I can attest how difficult it was to draw the forms on paper pre computer.

[@urdnal]

Dracula with his castle was a real innovator in this regard. And took it a step further.

[@jeremy4148]

Wren could have just used hyperbolic trig functions, but he would have had to wait a century for them to be invented.

[@Atlas.X9X]

Fascinating content. Thank you Stewart.

[@Lifes2short2hurry]

Wow. Feels intuitive in retrospect. Amazing what kind of mind would just conceive of this.

[@markmiller4414]

Loved this video. Being a computer scientist, another perspective is that the upside down approach is kinda sorta like an analog computer.

[@stephentrier5569]

It's absolutely an analog computer. An analog is a thing that is comparable to another. That's exactly what's going on with the inverted chain or sheet representing the eventual structure. If it doesn't feel like a computer, consider how one could do what-if experiments with the added weights to try out different loading scenarios.

[@NeovanGoth]

That's exactly what I, also a computer scientist, thought while watching the video.

[@twylanaythias]

Gaudi was infamous for using excessive ornamentation in his designs, to the point where his name became synonymous with it (gaudy).

[@MurderWho]

The word "gaudy" predates Gaudi by centuries, having evolved *probably* from a re-adjectivatization of "gaud", which referred to a large ornamental bead in a rosary.

[@rugbybeef]

Thank you for this explanation! I've been to see the Sagrada Familia and even saw the model in the basement being told that it was how he designed the structure. Until now, I didn't really have a conception for how or why his model worked.

[@MRMAN5551]

Leo Chow from SOM spoke to our studio last week and he showed us several slides of them doing structural studies upside down, very cool to see a video explaining it more in depth. Crazy coincidence!

[@GadreelAdvocat]

I made a sketch of a building that had elements of upside-down looking arches and right-side up arches.. It also included columns and obelisks.

[@alxk3995]

That was quite a ride. Thoroughly enjoyed that. 💜

[@UnbeltedSundew]

I had no idea Gaudi's plans for the catherdral got destroyed, so glad that the young arcitect was able to figure out a way to rescue the work.

[@glennvanderburg8708]

Nice video. One thing you didn't explain was the little weighted bags hanging from the strings in Gaudí's models. Those are there to represent the additional forces that would need to be supported at those points. In compression (right-side-up) that would be extra weight, such as a tower supported by the top of an arch. But in tension (upside-down), the analogue is to hang weights from the strings, proportional to the weight of what would need to be supported by the finished structure.

[@High-Tech-Geek]

I'm an architect and never knew this. Thanks!

[@danielstarr2483]

Visited the Gaudi Museum in barcelona, its worth a visit.

[@antonomaseapophasis5142]

Why did Wren not adopt the example of Brunelleschi’s 1436 dome in Florence?

[@red.aries1444]

The role model for St. Paul's is Michelangelo's cupola of St. Peter's Basilica. Wren had the problem that the structures at the construction site of St Paul, that already had been build, weren't strong and wide enough to withstand the pressure of the weight if he had build his dome in the same way and materials als Michelangelo, but wanted to reach his planned height of 365 feet, one for each day of the year. So he had to find another solution.

[@framegrace1]

Possibly it was inspired by it, but his solution is much better. Brunelleschi knew the round copulas fail by lack of support in the middle, and pointed copulas tend to do the opposite, to fail by bending inside on the sides. He just combined the two so they supported each other. Wern just realized that if the pointed cuppola is a catenary, it can stand alone and the round cuppola is not needed. He just added a fake round one outside because at that time an Egg Shaped cuppola will look very strange. (Inside is disimuled by the paintings)

[@TheGalacticWest]

This why builders truly deeply hate architects. Its also why mechanics hate engineers

[@alexandre.o.branco]

Frei Otto’s soap films follow the same principle of optimum tensions. Roof of Olympic Stadium in Munich and the new train station in Stuttgart are beautiful examples.

[@nilsb.8559]

This very much reminded me of the book "Miracles in Concrete" about the engineer August Komendant who worked intimately with Louis Kahn to create amazing solutions and often individual prefab systems.

[@wapartist]

This is cool and funny. I rotate in Cad all the time especially doing details and elevations.

[@vrpansy]

these buildings are amazing wowwww

[@MaxTSanches]

At a time before computer modeling. When you could really SEE the math.

[@saalamin1869]

Gaudí was, no other words for it a genius.

[@theaquifer]

Great video Steward! Clearly Built To Last!!!

[@CubeAtlantic]

Wow, that is nice these architects did that yrs ago they were wonderfully relaxin' & kind of strange in this case.

[@jhanschoo]

Note that the catenary curve is thus with respect to a chain, which is 2d. It works when the shape is constant in the 3rd dimension. If you want a dome, or funicular shape instead, I believe that the general shape is less wide, due to the greater mass departing from the center.

[@jatdesign4495]

I think you should look at Tulsa’s rose bowl (bowling alley) and chapel on the hill in broken arrow. It is thin shell concrete but weirdly I think my friend could have designed it upside down but he designed it like you normally would. It’s also an architect and engineer duo as well. Beautifully done and beautifully executed.

[@user-o4x4d]

Those skinny domes are screaming against gravity.

[@TediI47]

fascinating video

[@stevengalloway8052]

"Wren went back to the drawing board." I see what you did there! 😆

[@BalthasarCarduelis]

Interesting that an upside model is essentially how a resin 3D printer works, no?

[@1st1anarkissed]

That was worthwhile watching. Thanks!

[@BrandonBakerMONOMATIC]

I had a request for you. Would you consider doing a video about how the Astrodome (Houston, TX) and similar structures were made possible? Arenas are so large that it’s crazy some of them even exist. I used to see the Astrodome as a child and wonder how on earth humans could make such a thing; however, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still look at it with wonder as an adult. Thanks for the videos! -Brandon (long time subscriber and fan)

[@bipl8989]

Google It. Structural Engineering design software. All computer models now. No upside down hanging things these days.

[@The_Smith]

Great video Stewart! has given me a couple ideas for a project I'm thinking on. Thankyou.

[@pluribus_unum]

Fighting gravity with the force of gravity.

[@DrownedLamp]

Understanding tension vs compression ensures you don't end down like Titan.

[@shrimpkins]

mind blown 🤯

[@sicko_the_ew]

Very interesting. Thank you.

[@nevreiha]

so you're telling me that Robert Hook's favourite thing to do was to hang things from hooks?

[@nicovanos]

The upside down model of Sagrada Familia is amazing. Go watch it when you're in Barcelona.

[@theanarchonazbolinquisition]

Great video!

We have a beautiful airport in Medellín that was built like that.

[@lohphat]

Was the CNIT dome at La Défense outside Paris made with the same technique? It held the record for the largest concrete dome at one point.

[@TommyLikeTom]

Did anyone notice how the title of the video changed? these KZbinrs are like media analysts

[@soniashapiro4827]

Wonderful

[@tomnewsom9124]

The bit about contour lines is incorrect. Burry used ruled surfaces to create the column and vault geometries. This means taking two lines or curves and connecting them with a series of straight lines. Gaudi had already decided on such forms as they are relatively simple to build while also making complex shapes. Burry's achievement was translating this physical process into the digital realm. You showed his images, full of ruled surfaces, but no contour lines to be seen.

[@tomnewsom9124]

Also, Saarinen's TWA termial is not a compression shell at all, but two gigantic cantilevers.

[@kjyost]

Robert Hooke, Hook was a captain

[@bmenrigh]

Your renderings in this video were excellent but you should dedicate more time to them to reduce noise. Quite a few animations had significant ray tracing noise.

[@DaveEtchells]

Very well explained! (I’m afraid I’m an outlier on the Sagrada Familia though: I’ve never been inside it, but its exterior seems ugly to me :-/)

[@caractacuspottsAZ]

4:50 Pleasantly surprised to see the Humber Bay Arch Bridge pop up.

[@LizzieJaneBennet]

I hope you'll make a vodeo about Edenicity. I find it interesting and I wonder what you think of it.

[@DustinManke]

“He just didn’t truss them” Lmao

[@Cyber_Chriis]

No way the guy who invented handing buildings upside down is called Hook 😂

[@TyphD]

Good stuff as always!

[@kurero1431]

ROBERT HOOKE MENTIONED GRAAAAHHHHHHHH !!!!!

[@nutherefurlong]

Does this method inform at all what materials are best to use, or is that an entirely different skillset?

[@Illisil]

Your voice in this video reminds me of the voice of another youtuber who makes architectural vids

[@stephencurry8552]

Fascinating!

[@trbjrnjnssn]

Excellent!

[@tyeteames7192]

Great video.

[@mario.2412]

Good morning. Do you know the work of Engineer Eladio Dieste? He built curved walls with bricks and the shape, not the mass, is what kept the walls upright. He has a vast and recognized work. The most named is the "Church of Atlantida", of which (as far as I know) a copy was made in Spain. Your channel is excellent. Greetings from Uruguay. P.S. Will you one day be able to incorporate Spanish dubbing with AI? The subtitles, while good, distract from the image.

[@mexdek2061]

Tip: if your talking about materials flowing from 1 form to another, dont show sigmented individual pieces.

[@DO_NOT_HUMP]

POV your resin print just finished

[@MrSaemichlaus]

Isler got Hooked and then he just Wren with it.

[@sirsplintfastthepungent1373]

Have you ever seen The Egg in Albany, NY?

[@user-kw9qu2gz8v]

Just want to mention that Sagrada Familia is not a cathedral but a basilica as Barcelona already has a medieval cathedral, that of St Eulalia.

[@czerskip]

Doesn't really matter. Who cares about the internal structure of an organization? This is about architecture and a building is a building…

[@carlito6038]

a basilica can also be a cathredral, dumb pedant

[@drdca8263]

Huh, I would have expected other things to not carry over quite right when flipping things over, even if the tension/compression flip works. I’d be interested to read/see an elaboration on how closely the analogy works, and more detail on why it works as well as it does. For a chain, the weight per length is constant, I guess with bricks or steel or whatever, the weight per volume is also constant for any particular material… When a chain is hanging, the tension on a given part of the chain is, I guess in the simple case where nothing else is hanging from the chain, is half the weight of the part of the chain that is lower than it, uh, multiplied by some factor depending on the angle from vertical that that part of the chain is at… And, for an arch, the vertical compression force on some part is again, half the weight of the part above it… But, hm, it seems to me that the horizontal component may be different from how a chain works? The chain resists well a tension force which is outward along the direction the chain is aligned in, but doesn’t much resist forces perpendicular to that. If stacking bricks, it seems to me that these resist compression that would push the bricks together, but something which would push the bricks across each-other wouldn’t be as resisted, so, I guess to make the analogy work, the layers between the bricks should be perpendicular to the curve that the chain corresponds to, … which I guess is what they do with arches… they don’t just lay all the bricks horizontally so that the overall shape is like an arch. Huh. I guess you need a lot of custom brick shapes then? Or maybe it is sometimes enough to use the cement or whatever between the bricks to gradually (gradually over space I mean, not gradually over time) adjust the angles of the bricks?

[@Cadcare]

You need to do a video on Lightweight Structures now. Pantyhose, sticks, string, scissors and glue.

[@bombayvega7021]

new approach "Design upside down". Machu-pichu was designed "upside down". How do I know it? Notice the top of the stone. the top edges are often cut to accommodate the shape of above stone.

[@musicmikeish]

Very interesting

[@maebhryan3040]

It's not a cathedral, it's a minor basilica.

[@盧璘壽로인수]

never knew this technique wasn't actually unique to Gaudi also Sagrada Familia *IS NOT A CATHEDRAL* ; originally an Expiatory Temple, it's currently a Minor Basilica as dedicated by Benedict XV a cathedral is the seat ("cathedra") of the diocese's bishop: Barcelona's seat is at the *Cathedral of Sta. Eulalia* the *2026 completion date is no longer viable* due to COVID-19 and issues with Barcelona residents regarding the entrance part 2026 is the date when *the central crossing (the "Jesus" tower) will be completed* and topped by the 4-armed cross (which your computer model didn't use)

[@ungh8365]

How many thumbnails and names are you going to try???!!!

[@Artista_Frustrado]

i feel silly not realizing that Sagrada Familia is still unfinished

[@IVWOR]

Цікаве та пізнавальне відео. Дякую ❤️

[@DelmaRaySmithJr]

Up Side Down

[@MaxBrix]

Hooke had a propensity for hanging things.

[@necronsplayer]

Leave it to a guy named Hook to design stuff swangin!