Textiles and Archaeological Sites: Towards a Methodology for Designing Lightweight Protective Structures

The shelter for archaeological areas aims to protect ruins from damages, in order to preserve their historical values, while the excavation work represents a destructive action. The shelter design process for archaeological areas includes dealing with some contradictions, due to the multiplicity of constraints and the complexity of the application contexts. The article aims to state the appropriate use of membranes and temporary structures in these fragile environments through a new concept of textile lightweight solution coming from a decision support matrix. In this applicative example, the elasticity of the proposed textile material – that is a polyurethane-coated knitted textile – and its combination with a bending-active structural element, become a key aspect for reconfiguring the whole system to different sets of problems. The example therefore understands active bending as an approach to generating new structural forms, in which common load bearing behavior is found due to the structures inherently large elasticity and inner stress state.