Hershey Arena: Anton Tedesko’s Pioneering Form

Civil engineering structures are part of our cultural heritage. The story of who we are can be told, in part, by what we have built. There have been pivotal moments in civil engineering design history wherein a master engineer creates a pioneering structure. One major example is Anton Tedesko’s 1936 Hershey Ice Arena, the first large-scale thin shell concrete roof in the United States. Tedesko left all his papers, including the original design and analysis calculations of the Hershey shell, to the Princeton Maillart Archives. These documents, as well as other archival materials and photographs, provide insight into the design history of Hershey, and the transfer of thin shell technology to America. In this paper, we retrace the design and analysis calculations performed by Tedesko, and compare them to modern computer models. We show that the hand calculations are sufficiently accurate, and in fact are necessary for initial form finding. We close by pointing out the enormous impact that this design had in thin shell concrete construction, and argue for the preservation of this remarkable structure. CE Database keywords: Thin shell structures; Technology transfer; Conceptual design; Historic sites; Roofs; Structural engineering. sign, and of the intimate connection between design and construc­ tion. Tedesko single-handedly brought that technology of thin shell concrete roof structures to the United States from its country of origin, Germany. He took ideas developed in one society, trans­ ferred them to another society, and changed those ideas to fit that destination, the United States. The Hershey Arena represents the first and formative stage in that transformation where he had to explain this radically new form to American engineers and then prove to them that it could be built economically in a new social context. A major part of this explanation involved demonstrating a conceptual design that would be both reasonably accurate and convincingly clear to those unfamiliar with the foreign experi­ ence. By building his conceptual calculations around the standard arch form, Tedesko could show how his huge structure could easily carry the design loads. But he also had to convince engi­ neers and especially his client the Hershey organization that his plans for construction would be structurally sound and economi­ cally satisfactory. Any concrete structure is weakest during the construction and therefore the process of building is as critical as the performance after completion. Thus, Tedesko had to think about construction as he thought about design. His German expe­ rience was with the pioneering firm of Dyckerhoff and Widmann A.G., which did both design and construction. Thus, as a builder Tedesko was intimately familiar with all aspects of the design. Finally, we critique the design and construction to show the conservative basis for Tedesko’s calculations, the elementary fea­ tures of his design, and the difficulties he faced in directing an almost totally inexperienced construction crew. Without his con­ tagious confidence the project would never have been carried through to a successful end.