Portfolio Dome

The Millennium Dom was commisioned by the british government in 1994. It was to house fourteen exibits, and thousands of people arriving to view them in the dome were immersed in controversy. It was built on the site of a former gasworks facility. In Order to begin building an extansive amount of money was spent to remove as much toxic from the site as possible. The eventually had to seal the ground with concrete platforms before erecting the new building. Originally the structurewas meant to be tempaorary. It was not until Tony Blair came into office that the decision was made to make it a permantent addition to the London skyline. Richard Rogers was chosen as the architect with Burro Hapold as the leading engineer. The done itself is not really a dome, but a hemispherical tensile membrane. It is now the largestin the world, taking the title from the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. It’s nearly a mile in circumfrence and encloses an area of 1 million square feet. Twelve 100 meter tall masts hold the dome 164 feet over the ground. The roof is PTFE-coated fiberglass fabric. The fabric roof, with a 30 meter tension ring at the center, is held together by a radial tensioned cable system which controls deflection and provides locations from which the roofing is tied to both the top and the bottom of the towering twelve masts. In an attempt to defy physics, the entire roof structure weighs less than the air contained within it.