Daily Photo – The Solar Sail in the Belfast Dome
When Belfast needed a central city upgrade after the signing of the Good Friday agreement in 1998,they poured £400 million pounds into a new complex which they named Victoria Square Shopping Centre. Its designers had ambitious and lofty goals with the crowning glory of the entire complex – the cherry on top if you will – was a huge glass dome that sat an impressive 45 metres off the ground. Made up of 635 individual triangular panes of glass held in place by a massive steel framework weighing 200,000 kilograms – it was the equivalent of roughly 40 adult elephants floating effortlessly above the city. When finished, the dome provided an impressive 360-degree panoramic view of the Belfast skyline, which the public could enjoy from a public viewing platform, offering views that stretch from the historic Belfast City Hall and the contours of Cavehill, all the way across to the towering yellow Harland and Wolff cranes in the Titanic Quarter.
The only problem with all of this was that engineers quickly discovered during the design process that what they had created was in actual fact a giant hotplate above the streets of Belfast. On the rare occasions that Belfast had a sunny day, the dome would act as a massive glasshouse and without intervention, the viewing platform and streets below would become unbearably hot. The solution was a stroke of genius. Instead of pulling the whole thing apart, the solution came in the form of a simple rotating fabric solar sail designed to track the sun throughout the day, filtering out the intense glare and heat of the Belfast sun, naturally regulating the open-air microclimate below so everyone could happily go about their day without having to worry about being burnt to a crisp or spontaneously combusting while shopping for socks!
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