Minda Car Parking Tensile Structure

A manufacturing plant with a large workforce needs somewhere for staff to park, and in most of India that means two-wheelers by the hundred. The brief for a canopy like this is simple to state: cover as many bays as the space allows, keep the parking and the access aisle clear of columns, and build it fast enough to keep pace with the rest of the site.

Ekra Decor delivered the structure end to end — survey, 3D design, fabrication of the galvanised steel frame and the membrane, and installation.

Two-wheeler parking is long and thin — rows of bikes at right angles to an access aisle — and that geometry is a natural fit for a barrel-vault roof. A single curved membrane spans the bay from one column line to the other and simply repeats along its length, so the frame is a series of identical arched bents rather than a complex one-off shape.

The curve is doing structural work, not just styling. Pre-stressing the fabric over an arched profile keeps it taut, stops it lifting or flapping under wind, and sheds rain cleanly to the low edge. Ekra Decor designs the steel to IS 800 and checks the canopy for wind, rain and seismic loads to the applicable Indian codes, with the foundations sized for the uplift that governs a lightweight roof. Keeping the column line to one or both edges leaves the bays and the aisle open so bikes can be wheeled in and out freely.

The steel bents are cut, welded and hot-dip galvanised in the workshop and the membrane is cut and welded into panels off-site, so the canopy arrives as a kit of parts. On site the crew casts the footings, erects the repeating frames, runs the membrane over them and tensions it.

Here that was done on an active construction site, with the rest of the plant still going up around the parking bay. Deliveries and lifts were fitted around the other trades and the site’s crane movements, and the finished canopy — steel, membrane and edge details — was handed over ready for use.

The plant gained a covered two-wheeler park: bikes are protected from sun, rain and dew, the bays and aisle are clear to move through, and the canopy was put up without holding back the wider construction programme. Upkeep is minimal — an occasional wash and a periodic check of the frame fixings.

Ekra Decor builds two-wheeler parking structures and car-parking tensile shades for factories and campuses across the country. More completed parking projects are on the projects page.