As part of a recent study, researchers at Princeton University and the University of Bergamo have uncovered the engineering techniques behind the self-supporting masonry of the Italian renaissance, reports the Princeton Engineering website. "Researchers analyzed how cupolas like the famous duomo, part of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, were built as self-supporting, without the use of shoring or forms typically required," the school writes.
Looking at structures such as the famous Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, which is the largest masonry dome standing today, the team was able to discover an intricate geometric pattern in the brick placement of the domes that form a kind of herringbone v-shaped pattern which allow certain bricks to act as "lynchpins," making the structure self supporting. The cross-herringbone configuration is known as a double loxodrome, according to the research team.
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Didn't PBS already do a whole show on this? They even dug up the trial dome construction thing in a parking lot or something.
Great Cathedral Mystery, premiered February 2014.
That sow was pretty good. Does this "research" expand on that?
Yes, that was a great documentary. I believe the gentlemen from the program who worked on the replica was Massimo Ricci from the University of Florence. I seem to remember that he developed/rediscovered a technique for constructing the replica using ropes as construction guides, in addition to mastering the nuances of the spiraling herringbone (spina di pesce) brickwork.
This research does seem to add to that, and instead of a single spiral it seems that they've identified two spirals in opposite directions (which they refer to as a "loxodrome"), which is essentially diaper pattern in brick, or a diagrid.
Actually, looking a little more closely at the article, the diagram that is shown is in fact Santa Maria, in Ciel d’Oro which has a double spiral, while the Santa Maria del Fiore still appears to have one. It seems the researchers used the key revelations from Brunelleschi's dome to investigate the structural solutions in other Renaissance domes.
“Researchers” at Princeton. Well! For all the money it cost to travel to Italy, hire laborers to set up scaffolding so these researchers could scuffle up there and examine the brickwork in the dome of the Crossing of Santa Maria del Fiore, they could have gone to the public library and found out that herring-bone brickwork was only part of the reason this immense structure did not come crashing to the ground. The brilliant part is not the masonry, per favore, but the unique idea of Donatello to put a second dome inside the first. Hence the famous stability Anyone can see the herring-bone pattern and its effect on the structural stability cries out for recognition.
This “discovery” points up a problem. More and more papers that claim to be discoveries are merely spruced up old discoveries. I remember once at Indiana University, someone was coming to talk about some arcane aspect of the lives and training of the Troubadours. Interested, I went to the library to read a little more on the subject before the lecture. I came across an article, in French, published in the1820s or 30s. The lecture that evening—the original work—turned out to be pretty much an English translation of the article I had simply stumbled across that afternoon . And this guy was a famous researcher. So boys and girls, study those French verbs.
the dome on the Florence Cathedral was designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, not Donatello.
wait, it wasn't the ninja turtle?
yes, of course. Thank you. I’d I thought I was so smart!
Ross King "Brunelleschi's Dome : The Story of the Great Cathedral of Florence", Vintage (a Random House publisher) 2008, first published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 2000, in paperback by Pimlico 2001.
Herringbone brickwork covered on page 98.
"Filippo must have known that these spiralling bands of upright bricks would constitute planes of weakness, since they were less able than a more conventional bond to counter the hoop stresses that threatened to crack the dome. Why, then, should he have chosen to use the herring-bone bond?
The reason behind Filippo's choice of this pattern lies in the particular structural behaviour of arches and domes. A dome is built on the principle of an arch, whose stones, as we have seen, are kept in place by mutual pressures brought into play by their own weight. Once complete, each of them is under circumferential compression and therefore, like an arch, becomes self-supporting. But the problem in constructing a dome arises from the fact that these rings cannot be built instantaneously. Some form of temporary support is therefore needed until the rings are complete because, until they are closed, the tendency of the masonry is obviously to fall inwards.
Filippo used the herring-bone bricks in order to counter this tendency. [...]
Where exactly Filippo learned of the herring-bone bond is one of the dome's unsolved mysteries. The pattern had of course been known to masons and bricklayers for many centuries. The Romans made extensive use of the bond they called opus spicantum, and the pattern is also found in the half-timbered brick walls of Tudor houses in England. In both of these cases, however, it is decorative rather than structural..."
Ross King goes on to mention other potential sources for the bond pattern, inlcuding Persian and Byzantine domes, as well as mentioning that the capomaestro (aka GC) of the Dome, Giovanni Battista Nelli wrote that "Operating in this manner, any massive curved structure can be raised from the ground to any height whatsoever without support from centring or scaffolding."
Adding to the choir here, but quite literally this Princeton article does not seem to bring anything new to the table, other than an application of the Discrete Element Model and Limit State Analysis to the structures in question.
actual article from the Engineering Structures magazine is found here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
(will read later today, perhaps there's more actual discovery in the actual article, as opposed to Princeton's PR post)
Own a copy, great book....glad you looked it up first and transposed here.
Ross King is a fantastic author. "Leonardo and the Last Supper" was also a great read. I recently picked up the one on Claude Monet, and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, but haven't gotten to them yet.
might have to order that to add to the reading list...WFH has allowed more time for reading.
Brunelleschi's Dome by King was an excellent book. I was confused when first coming across this article for the same reason, but it seems the school is investigating the "deeper" physics aspects behind Brunelleschi's approach. But still, I feel King goes quite in-depth in his book already.
I can’t tell whether my other post got posted or not so I’ll repeat it briefly. I wrote Donatello for Brunelleschi. As I wrote, I thought, that sounds wrong. I should check that, but I did not. The mistake was made because I said: what the hell, no one will read this anyway. With that attitude, scholarship is destroyed, and I have dedicated my whole life to good scholarship and right, verifiable thinking. There are two problems with the mistake I made: one, in scholarship, TRUTH matters, not how many readers one may have and who they may be; two, in my haste to see what was wrong elsewhere, I made myself and not the truth the important thing. This dedication to self rather than the truth may seem a small sin in this context, but it can bring down whole civilizations. It is the difference between manipulation with fancy words and selfless contribution to the welfare of mankind. The rubble that was Germany in May,1945, be my metaphor.
It's good to own one's mistakes. On a sidenote - any architect that doesn't know about Brunelleschi is immediately suspect in my view. In truth, I run into far too many such "suspects" all the time
Well, I must always guilty when I consider the totality of knowledge. What was it my friend, Isaac Newton, said about feeling like a child sitting on the beach counting pebbles?
Excellent comment threadkilla. Now, on to more important issues. If there were to be a 5th turtle, would Brunelleshi be the top contender? And if so, what colour, weapon, and catch phrase would he get? Now that is a thesis subject.
There once was clown from this town
Who lived in a dome of renown
En masse they descended
To examine the famed carcass
But inside they found only a lonely poor
clown
How drole.
I love that word: How Drole! It brings up images of cocktail parties given to welcome displaced members of the Russian aristocracy and intelligentsia—men and women like Isaiah Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Melania Trump (So! What’s a little Cyrillic among friends!) to the home of the, as yet, unbeheaded and the Land of Rhetorical Delusion. Well done
Man you're really beating yourself up about this.
.
And I think NS meant droll, he just speaks the weird English.
nope, drôle. Missed the little hat on the "o".
Sure looks like the weird English they speak up there in Canuckistan to me. ;)
NS, Brunelleschi would def. be a top contender for the 5th turtle, right alongside Alberti I would think.
To SneakyPete. Talk about weird English, how bout weird German? I haven’t heard that word, Canutkistan, in fifty years. I forget who wrote,one of the Grimm brothers perhaps, but that anyone would know that arcane short story, recte: Kanitverstan is amazing. The story of a mason from Holland who goes to Germany to work and people think his name is Canutkistan because whenever they talk to him , he says Canutkistan. What he’s really doing is telling them he’s not dumb, but he Kannitverstan, or I‘Kann nit verstan—ich kann nicht verstehen . Thus, he spends his time in Germany as Mr. I DON’T UNDERSTAND
You butcher German as badly as you mangle English. I am starting to think the buttons are not the problem.
cont. (this damn button pushing). I make no pretense to expertise in architecture . I almost castrated myself setting up a tent in Tahiti, but, as a medieval musicologist, I do indeed pretend to “medievalism,” both appearance and love of subject, I have always been convinced that there is more than a close coincidental relationship between music and architecture in the Middle Ages. In fact, in his magnificent book, MONT SAINT MICHEL AND CHARTRES, Henry Adams, who could lay claim to being the first American to study medieval music, was also the first to try to transcribe the music Itself, and, in his wonderful way, to connect it to other arts. The man’s knowledge of old and Middle French is absolutely staggering. Beside a a time-traveling sense and informed appreciation of the architecture and the motivation for it’s construction. To the point here, You May find it wonderour, apropos of music and architecture, that there was a sort of Beethoven 9th of the 15th century written for the lavish celebration of the dedication of the Dome of Santa Maria and for the Cathedral generally. The piece is by the great,innovative Guillaume Dufay and is called NUPER ROSARUM FLORES—TERRIBILIS EST LOCUS ISTE (the Gregorian chant for the dedication of a church, which serves as a basis for the other music parts. What makes this piece unusual, but not unique in the Middle Ages, is that 1) we usually think of medieval music consisting of only a small number of highly skilled singers and players. A witness to the performance reports that NUPER ROSARUM was performed by 104 musicians; 2) for connection between music structure and the architecture of the Cathedral—the non-plus ultra. All the major dimensions of the cathedral are reflected in the architecture of the music ( What is music but architecture in sound?). For example (and this is memory and a poor one at that speaking but, although there is disagreement among scholars, one can easily look up the correct dimensions. The nave of Santa Maria is 166 Florentine braccie (sp?) in length; the first part of the motet is 166 beats long; the transcript is 120(?) braccie, corresponding to 122 beats; the elevation 96, corresponding to 96 beats, etc. Inter Music (et architeturumque) et cantorem, magna est distantia, qoud qui cantat, sed non sapit, definitur bestia. Good talking to you. Take care. Dixit
This peroration goes with the “reply” above it. This button-pushing drives me nuts because I end up doing all sorts of things with the electro-magnetic force that is ruining my horse-and-buggy stability.
pump the brakes, bro!
sorry about the spacing. These touch buttons!!
I think I enjoyed the comments more than the article :) Thanks I was having a rather grumpy day until now. I too felt that most of the "new" research was just a retelling, but I'm not an expert on these things, my most memorable architectural history lesson about the dome was the broken eggshell story. You learn something new everyday, and usually its NOT from the original story but from the others who comment (just like in my old classes, I learned more from the other students and their experiences than I did from any book).
You have touched on one of the most compelling why we should not be concerned about machines (with buttons) will not take over in education after the present Coronavirus isolation is over. Of course, different subjects call for different approaches. One does not abandon the accepted procedures for brain surgery in favor of each student “expressing him/herself.” But we have accepted too much—as in everything else. I have a cat. I throw away a mountain of packaging to feed it—the superficiality for the substance. How does one get to the substance in a world that fears the truth (in many things), preferring an easy, pretty lie for the hard, ugly truth. Every detail of how we got ourselves into this climate change mess is contained in Moby Dick. But to get at what he was trying to tell us requires work—thought—not some goofball test dreamed up by the meritocracy gang at the ETS. Most professors in the humanities are curriculum addicts. But the real learning takes place when those with the interest and the courage think. Not outside the box—more packaging—but outside the prison that is education, and especially that scam, Education as a discipline in itself. If you love the poetry of Sappho of Lesbos and—too much to ask?—read it in Greek, you won’t need a course in how to teach it. The driving out of Greek and Latin and their replacement with empty how/to courses is no different than the Ford, I believe it was, Motor Company convincing the City of Los Angeles to tear up hundreds, maybe thousands of miles of track for cleaner street railways and replace them with stinky buses. Well, getting to be another topic. Abandon the prison of the classroom and learn from your fellow scholars. It’s cheaper and more effective.
My what discourse can follow quarantine. It did seem like "old news" but I could not quote the sources. Just this week a friend posted this photo of much more recent construction at the NYS capitol:
not quote any souces. Just this week a friend shared this photo:
It sound so strange to me that no one cited the work of one of the most important professor of structures in Italy, Dean of the Florence Faculty of Architecture and the first after 500 years to deeply and completely understand the way the Brunelleschi's Dome works. I forgot, he was a genius and a greatly respected professor. His name was Salvatore Di Pasquale.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvatore_Di_Pasquale
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussione:Salvatore_Di_Pasquale
https://www.amazon.it/Brunelleschi-costruzione-della-cupola-Santa/dp/8831777947
Princeton Engineers arrived a bit late, just a few decades after Di Pasquale. All his work is saved at the University. Check for it.
i would love to read the new article to understand what they really found out that others specialists didn't.
I appreciate the consequence of Princeton, primarily in regard to societal guidance. Their university is undoubtedly bridled to unwieldy gang of Americanos.
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