Workers gently brought down a 43-foot tall memorial tower in the atrium of Texas A&M University’s Langford Architecture Center building A July 18, 2008, on the advice of a structural engineer.
The unique structure honored the memory of Alan Stacell, who for 40 years served as teacher, mentor and friend to a legion of young Texas A&M designers at the university’s College of Architecture. Plans call for a new design competition this fall to honor his memory.
A group of Texas A&M architecture students, inspired by Stacell, designed and built the structure in 2002 as a memorial to him. He succumbed to cancer Dec. 9, 2001 shortly after retiring from the Department of Architecture.
Former College of Architecture executive dean Charles Graham noticed some of the structure’s plates were buckling and cracks were forming in some of the turnbuckles for the cables, so he contacted Thomas Gessner, general partner of Gessner Engineering, LLP to take a look at the structure. Graham is now the dean of the College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma.
Gessner said the tall and narrow dimension of the tower put a lot of pressure on its slender, vertical plates, causing them to buckle. “Because of the buckling of the vertical plates, which was visible, we wanted to limit access to it, ” said Gessner.
After careful consideration, said Graham, it was concluded that the structure should be removed.
“It was a cool structure,” said Gessner. “If it had been laterally cable braced to one of the upper floors, we may never have seen an issue.”
The area around the tower was roped off until college digital fabrications manager Chuck Tedrick, assisted by second-year construction science student Brawny Gary, brought the structure down July 18.
The tower’s dismantling is not the end of the college’s tribute to Stacell.
“An endowment exists for the Stacell sculpture, so the plan is for a competition in the classes in the Department of Architecture this fall to design and build a new sculpture,” said Graham. “A jury will select the winning design, and the funds from the endowment will be used to construct the new sculpture.”
Graham said plans call for the winning sculpture to be displayed for two or three years, and then another design competition be held for a new one.
“We have discussed this with Professor Stacell’s family and they are excited at the prospects of Professor Stacell’s legacy being continued in this manner,” said Graham.
“With Alan Stacell, the possibilities were always endless,” said Patrick Winn, a senior architecture student when he spearheaded the project that led to the construction of the 43-foot tower. “He would never discourage us from the most far-fetched ideas. He would just let us keep going."
Technically described as a “tensegrity” structure, the tower stood because of a unique structural pattern that results when push and pull have a win-win relationship, or tensional integrity. In other words, the continuous pull is balanced by a discontinuous push producing counterforces of tension and compression.
The project began when Winn, as a sophomore student in Stacell’s structural design class, was handed a sketch of a tensegrity structure and asked to see if it worked.
Winn developed a design model of Stacell's unique sketch and worked intermittently to refine it. He described the structure as an inverted diamond-shaped box truss, or chain where the links never touch. It was pulled together in both directions by tensioned cables that kept the structure in equilibrium.
"Professor Stacell was in tune with his students and excited about teaching," Winn said. "As a result he instilled in us an incredible passion and in the process created an indelible legacy that lives on in the many students whose lives he has profoundly touched."
The Alan Stacell Memorial Tower comes down - 480 x 272 (mov).
The Alan Stacell Memorial Tower comes down - 640 x 360 (mov).
