The Wave space frame installation brings hands-on learning to D.C.

For a Catholic University professor and her students, a recent exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., was all about getting out of the classroom.

A piece called The Wave, on display at the museum from December of 2025 to February of 2026, showcased the possibilities inherent in metal space frame design while giving architecture students the opportunity to see a built project come to fruition.

“I had hundreds of students volunteering to put it together,” says Tonya Ohnstad, AIA, assistant professor at the School of Architecture and Allied Arts at the Catholic University of America. “I had young professionals from firms coming out [saying] ‘Oh, this is cool;’ they didn’t know how space frame [design] worked. D.C. is a really great laboratory for this kind of work.”

Ohnstad had previously built a relationship with the National Building Museum during another project three years ago, a full-scale reconstruction of a 12-century wooden Notre Dame Cathedral truss. Ohnstad also collaborated with the Smithsonian Institution, which was in possession of the pieces of the first long-span geodesic dome made by a student of Buckminster Fuller. However, they needed the specialized knowledge to put it together.

“I said, ‘Sure, I’ll try to figure this out,’” she says. “I worked with students for the next year and a half. We figured out the geometry; [there were] fabricators that all donated their time and energy to help put it together.”

With those experiences under her belt, Ohnstad kept in touch with the Building Museum and continued to think about innovative ways to use materials that lent themselves to the types of large-scale exhibitions that the museum frequently features in its sizeable courtyard atrium space. (Past projects in the space include The BEACH and Fun House, both developed by Snarkitecture, a New York-based design practice.) 

The space frame project’s full title, “The Lightness of Strength: Aluminum’s Role in Future Architecture,” bills itself as a demonstration of how a single material—aluminum—combined with structural innovation can respond to shifting material resources and the demands of rapid urbanization. In addition to Ohnstad, six Master’s students were involved in the project in the role of research assistants, as well as 25 students who took related courses during the academic year. Fabricators and engineers from Architectural Systems, Inc.; DSI Spaceframes, Inc.; and Norsk Hydro and Dyneema donated time and materials, as did building façade specialists Harmon. AIA cosponsored the National Building Museum exhibit. 

“We wanted to make an aluminum space frame and innovate on that using what we learned from Buckminster Fuller and his students,” Ohnstad says. “That was to embed a cable inside of the tube, an embedded tendon.” 

Students—together with Ohnstad—spent about a year coming up with different design options for the display, trying to find a design that fit the criteria of being expansive, but also showing “the strength in its lightness.”

“We really wanted to work with aluminum—that is really the central idea of the project,” she says. 

When it came time to fabricate and construct the exhibit, Ohnstad found that they couldn’t get the assembly together in the way they had originally envisioned. 

“We ended up having to make the decision to keep the aluminum on the ground, but we wanted to show that space frame is light and capable of long spans,” she says. “So, incredibly, DSI [Spaceframes] produced the steel version of it in a week.” So, in addition to the central “Wave” structure of the exhibit, an additional space frame was constructed using the original proposed aluminum cable-tendon strut system, utilizing 100% recycled aluminum. Ohnstad, her student Dave Stephen, and Mike and Maxwell Graves of DSI Spaceframe are currently seeking a patent for the system. 

“If you can make those super-slender members, you’re able to use a lot less material,” Ohnstad says.

Ohnstad says that one of the most rewarding parts of the project for her was seeing a sense of community grow between the students working on it. 

“I think [what] a lot of young people think they’re going to do in architecture is experience making a building, and then at school they’re working on their laptop and making things out of cardboard,” she says. The hands-on experience of The Wave allowed participating students to come together toward a shared goal. 

“Bringing architecture to the classroom has been the pedagogical move I’m focused on, in a way that makes architecture more accessible by educating more than just a small group of students that are doing an elective," Ohnstad says. 

Katherine Flynn is director, digital content at AIA.