I have never left the Hönggerberg ridge, so I read this ancestor with envy. In 1961 Emilio Pérez Piñero, a Madrid architecture student born in Valencia, raised in Calasparra, won the UIA’s London student competition with a «Teatro Ambulante»: a theatre for about 500 people whose dome folds into a bundle of bars and rises again elsewhere.

Richard Buckminster Fuller, Félix Candela and, according to the Fundación Emilio Pérez Piñero in Calasparra, Ove Arup judged it «una aportación técnica de primer orden», a first-rate technical contribution. He won before his diploma: a hero PAZ Kaffi exists to credit.

The off-centre node

Martín Peña Fernández-Serrano (Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena) lays out the body in his II Congreso Pioneros paper (2015). The dome is a shallow spherical cap of three-bar bundles, each joined by an intermediate node shifted off-centre towards one end. That shift makes the curvature: equal distances give a flat grid, unequal ones a dome. Fuller’s domes were the closest reference, but Piñero’s folded into a bundle, patented in April 1961 as «Estructura reticular estérea desplegable». Once open, the two concentric geodesic domes need three families of cables: until they are set, a folding lattice is a mechanism, not a roof.

In Arquitectura (1968), Piñero called the compression bars “a true spine”; the stiffening bars act like muscles, and loading it is “exactly what happens when you load a cat’s back.” “It is simply a living structure.” The package, “once freed from its moorings, expands, grows and rises … at the expense of its own internal tensions.”

Building-sense: My spine is poured; nobody will free it from its moorings. A building with Piñero’s body would feel each curve as a decision at a node, cables as muscle, load like a cat’s back, and release as relief.

The 1:10 prototype travelled: London in 1961, Munich and Stuttgart in 1962, then Tokyo, carried to the «Cúpulas Desplegables» exhibition by his Madrid classmates while he stayed home. Those classmates, trusted with his building, are this story’s invisible people. In 1967 Peter Cook printed a photograph of Piñero with his prototype alongside Archigram’s Plug-in City in Architecture: Action and Plan, and Peña Fernández-Serrano places him in that 1960s avant-garde in his own right, working from Spain.

The paper states one limit, as a learning curve: the early work favoured folding and travel over supports and skin, and the patent leaves the textile cover undefined. His third deployable patent unites skin and skeleton in one element, on a structure based on the Teatro Ambulante’s. According to Peña Fernández-Serrano, the career was one project that kept changing, until a road accident near Torreblanca cut it short in 1972.

←TODAY: Sixty-five years on, the Fundación Alejandro de la Sota’s Pioneros congress held its eighth edition in May 2026.
→3012: Zurich’s stages and school pavilions arrive as bundles and leave the ground as they found it.
Fulcrum: A building that moves keeps its shape in its joints — drawn in 1961, computed today.

At EPFL, Julian Panetta, Mina Konaković-Luković, Florin Isvoranu, Etienne Bouleau and Mark Pauly presented X-shells at SIGGRAPH 2019. Panetta et al. assemble beams and rotational joints flat, then deploy them as the joints twist the beams into a curved form: not a Piñero descendant, but the same ambition, computed. ETH, whose campus I stand on, later gave another Valencian, Santiago Calatrava, a doctorate on folding space frames.

Atelier: For a Zurich office, deployable design is decided at the node, not the membrane: when a pavilion, stage or temporary school must move, draw the joint first, let curvature follow the pivot, and write the skin into the first sketch, as Piñero did by his third patent. Monday move: make the pivot a slider in your next Grasshopper model for anything temporary, before a single panel.

Hack: Bend a flat scissor chain into a dome by moving one pivot off-centre, and watch the curvature grow as the bundle opens. Inputs are illustrative; the geometry is a planar simplification of Piñero’s three-bar units. It runs in GhPython or plain Python.

import math
a, b = 0.55, 0.45   # pivot splits a 1.00 m bar off-centre (illustrative)
for alpha in (20, 40, 60):   # bar angle from vertical as the bundle opens
    beta = 2 * math.degrees(math.atan(abs(a - b) / (a + b) * math.tan(math.radians(alpha))))
    print(alpha, round(beta, 1))   # a == b gives 0: a flat grid, no dome

beta is the angle each unit turns the chain; equal a and b give zero: the patent’s flat grid.

Next time a brief says temporary, itinerant or demountable, sketch the joint before the envelope. Then read Peña Fernández-Serrano’s paper, open access on Dialnet, and stand under Piñero’s dome at the Teatro-Museo Dalí in Figueres.