Configuration vs. Structure: Form follows function

This contribution is inspired by a quote of the engineer Tony Guéritte (1932): “The hyperboloid of revolution, in its simplicity as a mathematical body ofpure lines, gives a feeling of strength, stability and industrial beauty." It is reiterated that a surface makes clear an architecture, being its skin, the exterior part, thus giving it a formal connotation. The research therefore aims to analyse a hyperbolic hyperboloid, a cooling tower in Marghera now dismissed and converted. The research intends to clarify first the occurred analytical-geometric-historical process of the tower and its construction, then to demonstrate the geometric-mathematical importance of the hyperboloid of revolution to maximize the structural and thermodynamic performance of the tower. Through the simultaneous interface between parametric models and physical simulation environments, the study shows how the tower of the case study represents one of the possible optimization values in the domain of realizable hyperboloid forms.