Snapshot: Making the impossible possible

By Sigrid Tornquist

When Steve Frost of Stamford Tent & Event Services was asked to fit an 80-by-70-foot tent into an 80-by-50-foot space on a yacht club’s seawall, he said no. But when the client persisted, Frost eventually agreed to see if there was a way to make it happen. Inspired by the outriggers of a yacht’s mast, he decided to try cantilevering the tent over the seawall. “To be honest,” Frost says, “that’s the kind of challenge I love—when they don’t handcuff you with budget, when the client has a vision, when they want to do something exciting and different.”

Frost hired consulting engineers to help draft the plans, and the result was to cantilever the tent 8 feet past the seawall, anchoring it back into the seawall below the high tide level. The Stamford crew did much of the prep work weeks in advance, because the other obstacle was that the yacht club didn’t want them working on site during its hours of operation. The team worked on Mondays when the club was closed and before 10 a.m. or after 10 p.m. on other days. “We also had to juggle to work around the tide schedule,” Frost says. “We can do a lot of things, but we can’t control the tide.”

This project won two Awards of Excellence from IFAI’s Tent Rental Division.

Sigrid Tornquist is a freelance author and editor based in St. Paul, Minn. She is also the associate editor of InTents magazine, a publication of the Industrial Fabrics Association International.