Salwan, Ludhiana Entrance Canopy Tensile Structure

The brief for a residential entrance canopy is part practical, part architectural. It has to shade the deck and shelter the doorway — useful in a Punjab summer — but it also has to look like a deliberate feature of the house, because it is the first thing a visitor sees. A tensile canopy suits both: it can take a bold, unusual shape and still be a properly engineered, weatherproof roof.

Ekra Decor handled the whole structure — site visit and survey, 3D design of the star geometry and its steel frame, fabrication, and installation and tensioning — over about 180 m² in roughly 15 days.

A star canopy is built from a central hub with arms radiating out to a ring of high and low points. The membrane is pulled between those points so each bay between two arms forms its own small saddle surface — curved one way between the arms and the other way from hub to tip. Those individual curved facets are what pre-stress the fabric and give the whole canopy its faceted, crystalline look.

Because it is small and the loads are modest, the structure itself is light — a slender galvanised steel hub and arms on pad foundations — but it is still designed properly: Ekra Decor form-finds the geometry so the pre-stress is balanced across all the facets, works the steel to IS 800, and checks the canopy for wind uplift to the applicable Indian codes, which is the load that governs a small, exposed roof.

The hub, arms and fittings are welded and hot-dip galvanised in the workshop and the membrane is cut to its faceted pattern and edge-cabled, so the canopy arrives essentially complete. On site the crew casts the small pad foundations, stands and plumbs the central support and arms, then spreads the membrane and tensions each facet in turn until the star shape pulls up true.

With a small footprint and no major groundworks, the installation took about 15 days from first survey to a finished, tensioned canopy.

The property gained an entrance canopy that shades the deck, shelters the doorway and gives the house a distinctive arrival point. It is essentially maintenance-free — an occasional wash and a periodic check of the cable tensions.

Ekra Decor designs shade sails and custom fabric structures for homes and small commercial sites. See more finished work on the projects page, or read about tensile structures in Ludhiana.