The DHL Relay is an annual event in Denmark involving over 200,000 runners competing in teams of 5 over 5km in the 3 main cities; Copenhagen, Århus and Odense. The event requires each team to provide their own shelter leading to a proliferation of white marquees and gazebos. However, for this year’s event in Århus the team at Søren Jensen consulting engineers decided to create their own design.

With only 2 weeks to complete the design and build we adopted a ‘guerrilla engineering’ approach to the project using simple details and substituting lengthy computational analysis for physical modeling.

The final design was a cable net structure suspended within a rectilinear glulam timber frame with 1mm thick polyethylene cladding. The cable net was formed using 4mm diameter stainless steel wires with wire clamps at the nodes and fork-end connectors and steel eye bolts at the interface with the timber frame. A model of the geometry was created using Grasshopper, the form finding was done in Kangaroo and the sub-division mesh in Weaverbird. Grasshopper and Rhino Nest were used to create the cutting patterns and nest the polyethylene cladding panels.