Horst Berger (1928-) is a structural engineer and designer known for his work with lightweight tensile architecture. After receiving a degree in Civil Engineering in 1954 from Stuttgart University in Stuttgart, Germany, he began working in 1955 at the Bridge and Special Structures Department of Wayss and Freitag in Frankfurt. In 1960, he joined Severud Associates in New York city and worked on projects such as the St. Louis Arch, Madison Square Garden, and Toronto City Hall.
After forming Geiger Berger Associates in 1968 with air supported roof inventor David Geiger, his firm gained international recognition for its incorporation of lightweight fabric structures into permanent architectural designs.
During his time at Geiger Berger Associates, Horst Berger had the challenge of engineering the 105-acre (0.42 km2) roof designed by architect Fazlur Rahman Khan of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill for the Haj Terminal at the Jeddah Airport. This tensile fabric structure consists of 210 roof units contained in ten modules that are supported on steel pylons.
In 1990 Horst Berger was asked to create a tensile fabric roof for the Denver International Airport. Challenges of snow loading and attaching the rigid walls to the fabric roof made it one of Berger’s toughest projects. The unique design with the roofing structure gave the terminal a more spacious layout.
In 1990 he became a professor at the School of Architecture of the City College of New York.
Read more about Horst Berger: Principal Works Include
Famous quotes containing the word berger:
“The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house. Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)