How to build a strong MS tube elevation on a budget: the Fluid Motion Facade

The problem: a pool hall next to the playing field

Delhi Public School, Jankipuram had an open shed over its swimming pool, right alongside the school’s football and cricket field. The renovation had to enclose the pool and give swimmers privacy from the field. The catch was the neighbour: a goalmouth sits against the wall, and footballs and cricket balls would hit the facade every day.

So the facade was not just an elevation to be composed. It was a surface that had to survive impact before it could do anything else.

Why not ACP or HPL cladding for a strong elevation

The usual way to screen a building like this is to clad it in ACP (aluminium composite panels) or HPL (high-pressure laminate) panels. Both give privacy and a clean finish. Neither is made to take a cricket ball at full pace day after day: thin cladding dents or gets damaged, and replacing panels becomes a running cost. A closed skin also seals the pool hall, which needs constant fresh air.

Ching describes an exterior wall as a system that has to handle several jobs at once, from weather and air to light and structure. Here strength had to come first. We needed a facade that is strong, open to air and low-maintenance. That pointed to mild-steel (MS) tubes.

The concept: fluid motion

If the facade had to be made of steel tubes, the tubes themselves would carry the idea. Repeating MS tubes carry the steady, linear flow of water. Cut tubes carve an abstract figure: swimmers gliding through the pool.

The play of solid and void changes through the day, as shadows trace shifting patterns across the facade, like water shimmering in sunlight. The facade becomes the complex’s signature: more than an enclosure, a landmark that celebrates movement, performance and the elegance of water.

In Form, Space, and Order, Ching describes rhythm as the regular repetition of an element, which gives a composition a steady beat and a sense of movement. A screen of identical vertical tubes is exactly that: a continuous, calm rhythm, like the surface of water.

Building the facade on a budget: two tube spacings

Where the swimmers are drawn, the screen has to be dense enough for the figure to read. In those two panels we used 2"×2" MS tubes with a 2" gap between them: three tubes to every foot of facade.

Everywhere else, density matters less, so we saved steel. The rest of the facade uses 2"×2" tubes at 6" gaps, half as many tubes per foot, with a 3"×1" tube running alongside each one for part of its height. The 3"×1" pieces sit at a different height on each tube, so the screen still has movement, and the cost stays low.

Strength is the same everywhere: every tube is the same 2"×2" section, so a ball meets the same steel whether it hits a swimmer panel or not.

Figure and ground: drawing a swimmer in an MS elevation

To make the screen say “pool”, we did not add a sign. We took material away. In each swimmer panel, every other tube runs full height. The tubes between them are cut into pieces, and the gaps between the pieces trace the outline of a swimmer: the line of the back and arm, the head, and the water beneath.

This is the figure–ground relationship Ching illustrates with plans like Nolli’s map of Rome, and that the psychologist Rudolf Arnheim explains in visual perception: the eye reads a shape not only from solid marks but from the voids between them. Here the tubes are the ground and the gaps are the figure. Because every other tube stays whole, the wall stays one continuous, strong screen even where the figure opens it up.

A facade that changes through the day

Because the image is made of solid and void rather than paint, it is never quite the same twice. As the sun moves, the tubes cast shifting bands of shadow across the wall and into the hall. The facade is impact-resistant, naturally ventilated and low-maintenance, and it has become the signature of the school’s sports complex.