The “tent” is one of the oldest archetype of dwelling, after the caves the nomads started living in tents. Many architects and engineers found design and structural solutions in the tent made of con-crete. This solution expresses the beautiful contrast of a temporary object, the tent, solidified and turned into an unmovable and eternal object, the concrete building.

This paper will investigate the conceptual design of five great masterpieces of Architecture and Engi-neering that are tents of concrete: the Philips Pavilion,the church of San Giovanni Battista on the Highway A11, the Dulles International Airport, the Kuwait National Assembly Building and finally the Portugal National Pavilion.

These concrete tents are some of the clearest structural and metaphorical solutions where the form is function and meaning. The paper will focus on how these buildings were designed and on theirs structural behaviours.