"A collander... contains holes for draining food, but these holes do not stop it from being a shell. A sieve... is made from a large number of initially straight wires which are woven into a flat sheet and then bent into a hemisphere. It is also a shell, a gridshell. ...The spider web is essentially flat and made up of straight elements and when the wind blows, it bows outward like a sail and becomes curved. ...We call this a 'form-active' structure. This feature is characteristic of tension structures. The sieve may be in tension, compression, or a mixture of the two, but appears rigid. It does not significantly adjust its shape to the applied loading and, therefore, we call this a 'form-passive' structure. Where it is in compression, deflections lead to a structure becoming less able to carry the load, possibly leading to buckling. Columns carry loads via axial forces, but bending stiffness is required to stop buckling, and so it is with shells, although with shells buckling is resisted by a combination of bending and in-plane action."

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Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Added on April 10, 2026
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Original Language: English

Sources

, Ch. 3 "What is a shell?"

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thin-shell_structure