Mukesh Mittal leads structural review at Ekra Decor. A graduate engineer with more than ten years in tensile structures, he checks every technical page on this site that deals with how a structure stands up — how load travels, how a mechanism moves, how long a roof lasts — before it is published.

The work behind that is less about fabric than most people expect. A tensile roof is curved in two directions because the opposing curvatures are what allow it to be tensioned; get the geometry wrong and no amount of material specification rescues it. So review starts at form-finding — whether the surface that was drawn is one the physics will actually settle into — and moves through pre-stress levels, the load path from membrane to cable to mast to foundation, and the wind zone the structure has to survive rather than the one it was sketched for.

On retractable roofs the same discipline extends to the moving system: a fixed steel skeleton that carries both the stationary and the travelling load down to the foundations, a motorised carriage per bay kept synchronised with the others, and a safety chain — interlocks, limit switches, mechanical end stops, motor protection — that sits between an operator's command and the drive at all times.

Durability review is its own question. A membrane structure has two clocks running at different speeds: the fabric's and the steel's. Most of the guidance on this site about service life, maintenance intervals and when a roof needs re-skinning rather than replacing comes out of that distinction.

Ekra Decor has designed, engineered, fabricated and installed tensile structures in-house since 1998. Technical pages are written by the team that builds the work, and the structural guidance is checked against what the company actually details and erects.

Pages reviewed by Mukesh Mittal

The structures that review covers are in Ekra Decor's own archive: the company's largest is a 20,000 m² industrial roof for Siemens in Goa, and its most exposed is probably the 2,600 m² courtyard shade at Hazratbal Dargah in Srinagar, where snow sits still on a roof instead of blowing off it. A kerbside walkway canopy at IGI Airport Terminal 2 is the opposite problem — long, thin, and the shape most vulnerable to wind uplift.

Each of these carries a “Reviewed by” line naming Mukesh Mittal and the date it was last checked.

• Tensile structures — the complete guide
• Retractable roof systems
• How long tensile structures last
• Maintenance, inspection and re-skinning
• Tensile vs shade sail vs polycarbonate
• How a tensile structure is built
• Manual or motorised retractable roof
• Polycarbonate or fabric retractable roof

Last updated: 15 September 2026

Discuss a project with the team