Since 1997, the Structural Engineers Association of New York and The Museum of Modern Art, together with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University, have hosted a lecture series in honor of the structural engineer Felix Candela, who led the early exploration of tensile shell structures. This book compiles the first eight of those lectures, which were given by some of the most prominent structural engineers working today. Each text is accompanied by images. Among the contributors are Jorg Schlaich (whom Frank Gehry calls the world's greatest structural engineer), Christian Menn, and Leslie Robertson, the engineer of the original World Trade Center towers, as well as Stanford Anderson, Professor of History and Architecture at MIT on the work of the great Uruguayan engineer Eladio Dieste. The editor of this volume, Guy Nordenson, is a structural engineer in New York City and an Associate Professor of Architecture and Structures at Princeton University. Among his many projects as a structural engineer are the World Trade Center Emergency Building Damage Assessment and the World Trade Center Tower l.