The First Doubly Curved Gridshell Structure - Shukhovs Building for the Plate Rolling Workshop in Vyksa

In the year 1897, the renowned Russian engineer-polymath Vladimir Shukhov built a production hall in the town of Vyksa, a steel mill 150km southwest of Nizhny Novgorod. This building entails the first doubly curved gridshell structure. The paper explicates the construction of the building, its details, as well as the interdependence of its key elements. Different ways to conceive the geometry of the gridshell are discussed. A comparison between the original design method and the actual structural behaviour of the gridshell is presented in the last part of the paper.