Haven't I seen these before?
WindFire Designs RainShades make a new slot between cheap/disposable<—v—>giant, exotic, exorbitant.
Well…you haven't really seen these. When we first started designing these, we did it because the options available for residential tensile architecture, they really aren't there in an attainable way. What is available is an easy-up, or a costco "car cover", or a pergola, or some pre-made mesh shade shapes that don't fit any particular property. If you've ever tried to make one of these go tight between some trees you thought would be convenient, I'm betting it was, more difficult to fit-to-plan than expected.
This is really where the problems start. You have cheap made-to-break/deteriorate materials that don't stand up to wind. Or, you have floppy, mildew-ridden sun mesh that, IF you can get it to go tight, won't stay tight, and drips most of the water on the middle of the area when it rains. Or! you have multi-million dollar airport terminals and stadiums.
So where is this amazing membrane architecture for the regular people? No one (I mean it, I know people, and I've been to the trade shows!) is making them — for good reasons we can discuss later. Ok, can you find, something,,,yes! But it won't have all that these have, we know so.
Enter WindFire Designs RainShades.
They are big, beautiful, ecologically excellent, have a cradle-to-cradle bronze certification on the membrane that lasts for 20 years with some minor tweaks and cleaning involved. They are dry, silent, they don't flap around, you can hang hammocks in them, you can cover your pools that suffer from laser-sun, things under them are in suspended animation like a pole barn, because they basically stay untouched by the weather. You can light them at night, project mario kart on them, change their color by wifi, and they are gorgeous. You can take them down in about an hour. The one above for instance, our son, Otto, named it Flutterby. It's collectively 1500 sq feet. Uses 11 poles, and can be taken down in 30 minutes, and can be leave-no-trace in about 3 hours. Or it can be left up, untouched, for 20 years.
The poles, which can be wood, or metal, or truss, the footers for them are flex-mounted, and consist of what we call an elephant foot (our design) and an anchor. They can be removed easily disappear completely and leave your yard with just a patch of disturbed soil. The main rope auger anchors screw down 4 feet and have huge pull-out strength. They are what's used to secure mobile homes in hurricanes. We leave our RainShades up in the hurricanes we get here in Gainesville. We guarantee them against wind damage. Obviously chaos happens, but, as can be demonstrated on our physical models, even if an anchor pulls out during high winds, it just lies down with the pole still attached. Actually all aspects of them have super considered failure modes built-in. Having spent my entire life in wind sports, and more still, professionally repairing failed soft wings of all types for decades, I have a lot of ideas of what makes a great, safe, easy-to-repair failure, especially with these.
