Trustone Tensile Structure

A big building needs its front door to be obvious. The brief for an entrance canopy is to shelter the drop-off from sun and rain and, just as importantly, to give the entrance enough visual weight that a first-time visitor heads straight for it. On a landscaped forecourt it also has to sit well with the planting and the building’s architecture.

Ekra Decor’s scope covered the canopy end to end: survey of the forecourt and entrance, 3D design of the conical geometry and its steel supports, fabrication, and installation and tensioning, over about 240 m² in roughly a month.

The canopy is a small group of cones. Each one is formed by pulling the membrane up to a central high point and down to perimeter anchors, which gives a steep radial double curvature — the fabric is pre-stressed so it stays taut in wind, and every cone drains itself, shedding rain off its slopes clear of the doors and the drop-off.

Clustering two or three cones covers the entrance and the drop-off lane while keeping the peaked, lightweight character that makes the canopy a marker rather than a box. Ekra Decor form-finds the geometry in 3D, designs the steel to IS 800, and checks the structure for wind loading to the applicable Indian codes, with the anchor foundations sized for uplift and the mast bases for compression — the same engineering as a much larger conical roof, at entrance scale.

Each cone is cut as a set of radial panels and welded into a single piece in the workshop, and the masts, rings and perimeter steel are fabricated and hot-dip galvanised. The foundations are cast on the forecourt in parallel.

On site the crew erects and plumbs the masts, lifts the tension rings, then spreads and tensions each cone until its peak pulls up true. On a compact entrance forecourt the work is contained and quick — about a month from survey to a finished canopy.

The building gained an entrance canopy that shelters the drop-off and gives the front door a clear, distinctive marker from across the forecourt. It is a low-maintenance structure — occasional cleaning and a periodic tension check.

Ekra Decor builds entrance and drop-off canopies and custom fabric structures for corporate and commercial buildings. See more finished work on the projects page.