Civil engineering roof systems for outdoor environments find use in bazaars, car park areas, outdoor sport facilities and places built to protect people or their goods from environmental effects such as sun and heavy rain. Therefore, such roofing systems have great amount of application and each country spends huge volumes of materials to build these roof systems to improve life quality of people in cities. Thus, it is evident that further research on these civil engineering structures has the potential to decrease the cost of these roof systems and build more efficient ones. Generally these roof systems are manufactured employing structural steel material. As is well known, steel has promising mechanical properties such as high strength and high stiffness which can be exploited in structures that expected to receive very high magnitude of loadings, such as earthquake resistant buildings. However, there also exist some disadvantages of completely using steel in these roof systems. For instance, due to unit weight of material the roofs manufactured using steel are very heavy. So, construction process requires significant labour and time. Also steel construction is an expensive process considering measure of covered area for outdoor roof systems. Moreover, these kinds of roofs manufactured using completely steel are not flexible in use, that is to say, when it is unnecessary for some period of time it is not possible to remove the roof covering and re-cover it when it is necessary again. This paper investigates a novel concept in the world called as “tensile structures” used to cover wide outdoor areas. This concept actually combines civil engineering designs and some architectural aspects. Instead of using materials with high stiffness, tensile structures adapt membrane materials to cover wide areas. Cable elements accompany those membranes to transmit the internal forces and stresses to structural columns or ground. Although membrane materials have lower strengths compared to steel, these structures offer flexibility in use, light coverings, lower costs and faster construction time. Since these structures are built utilizing membrane materials and cables which support tension forces only, conventional stress office methods are not capable of handling their analyses and designs. Consequently, specific computational methods must be used to perform such designs. In this paper special commercial software is used to investigate behaviour of tensile structures. Three different configurations are employed to cover a wide area. Structural analysis procedures of those configurations are undertaken and stress distributions in membranes are investigated. Discussions pertaining to motivation behind these structures, load carrying capabilities and working principles are provided. Outcomes of this study illustrate that these tensile structures have the potential to replace some applications of steel roofs to lead lighter, flexible, low cost and more aesthetic structures for outdoor environments.