Eva Krismann

The basic idea for our tower was to create an elegant and organic shape out of a lightweight material.

After intensive material studies, we decided to build our tower out of bast. Bast gave us the decisive advantage of elasticity that we needed for our tower. In order to achieve optimal elasticity, we put our bast structure in water for several days, then stretched it and dried it. This allowed us to expand our structure from an initial 50 centimeters to 3.70 meters. We managed to increase the altitude by 740%.

We developed the structure from various network studies. Our tower consists of three tubes. The net consists of two millimeter thick bast rods that are connected with cable ties. The three tubes wind around each other in a clockwise direction. The ends of the tower adapt perfectly to the ground due to their great flexibility.

Tying 420 bast rods together with almost 3500 cable ties turned out to be very time-consuming. The on-site construction of our tower in Obergurgl, Tyrol, also turned out to be a bit complicated. Since the entire tower weighs only 1.2 kg, it could not withstand the strong wind and we had to develop a substructure. We therefore anchored Triplesec in the ground with wood and steel rods and also attached it with cords.

So stabilized, not even the rain could harm our tower.