Awnings have long been an effective way to brand a business, but other kinds of shade structures are emerging as an additional option, especially when organizations understand that branding isn’t only about company colors and logos. Shade structures can be a creative option to communicate branding as a message of a company’s (or a city’s) personality and what it promises its clients.“We think that fabric facades will start playing a larger role as shade structures,” says Claude Le Bel of Sollertia Inc. “They’re a great way to give form or shape to a project and an easy way to give a building a signature look.”

The director of the Ecole de Cirque de Quebec—a circus school in Quebec, Canada, that promotes the circus arts and stimulates the emergence of a new generation of artists—enlisted Sollertia to design and fabricate a fabric canopy for the school’s entrance. The director requested that the all-season tensioned canopy act as a symbol of the school’s mission, using the chapiteau—the circus big top—as inspiration. “The form of the structure was also inspired by movement, by the youthful suppleness of the body, by the grace and power of acrobatics and by the skin and spine of the skeletal structure,” Le Bel says. “The dynamic form and fluid lines of the tensioned membrane add an organic feel to the architecture.”

Structures can also be designed to reflect light to enhance branding capabilities. “A fabric’s smooth and translucent surface is a canvas for the interplay of light, shade and color, and we can create some incredible spaces using lighting,” Le Bel says. “With tension fabric structures we are able to create a large variety of unique architectural and geometric forms for our clients, giving them the benefit of strong brand recognition.”

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 Advanced Textiles Association.