Wooden Airship Gulliver Above DOX Centre in Prague, Czech Republic

• 11,492 members, 4,375 nodes modeled
• 976 load combinations analyzed
• 49-ton timber and steel structure

Gulliver's geometry combines fourteen curved timber-and-steel trussed arches, a tensioned steel cable bracing system, an ETFE form-found membrane roof, and two cantilevered steel support columns on pile foundations, all working together as a single irregular three-dimensional structure rather than a conventional building frame.

Structural engineer Zbyněk Šrůtek's team needed software that could model timber, steel, and membrane behavior within one integrated system and evaluate stability under wind, snow, and occupancy loads across a model with more than 11,000 members and nearly 1,000 load combinations. RFEM, together with its RF-TIMBER Pro, RF-STEEL EC3, RF-FORM-FINDING, and RF-STABILITY modules, let the team analyze the arches, cables, membrane, and steel supports as one coupled system rather than as separate calculations.

Gulliver's design team faced an unusually complex structural challenge: fourteen non-repeating curved arches at varying spacing, a tensioned cable bracing system, and an ETFE membrane roof all needed to work together as a single stable structure suspended above an occupied museum building.

The structure also had to support infrared heating and audiovisual equipment for year-round public use, carry snow and wind loads specific to an exposed, curved rooftop form, and transfer its full weight, roughly 49 tons, safely down through only two support columns and their pile foundations.

Before integrated multi-material FEA platforms like RFEM, structures combining timber, steel, and membrane elements were typically analyzed with separate, discipline-specific software or hand calculations: one model for the timber arches, another for the steel supports, and a separate form-finding process for any membrane surfaces.

Reconciling those independent analyses into one consistent structural picture was time-consuming and made it harder to capture how the different materials actually interacted under real wind, snow, and dead loads on an irregular, doubly curved form like Gulliver's.

Modeling all 4,375 nodes and 11,492 members of Gulliver's timber arches, steel supports, cables, and ETFE membrane within a single RFEM model, and running 976 load combinations, let the engineering team verify the entire coupled structure's behavior under wind, snow, and occupancy loads before construction began, rather than assembling separate timber, steel, and membrane calculations after the fact.

That integrated analysis supported a structure that has stood above the DOX Centre since December 2016, hosting literary events year-round thanks to its infrared heating and audiovisual systems, and remains, at 322 square meters and roughly 49 tons, one of the more structurally unusual permanent installations documented on Dlubal's own reference site.