Brick Vaults and Beyond. The Transformation of a Historical Structural System from 1750 to 1970

Vaults have been historically regarded as the ideal structure to span imposing spaces in representative and monumental buildings. Several studies have been devoted to the topic worldwide and cover the evolution of vaulting from antiquity to the beginning of its progressive decline in the eighteenth century. Yet in the following centuries, vaulting techniques still underwent a significant evolution – they were extensively used in historicism and attempts were made to adapt vaults to modern architecture. How did the changing architectural styles and the introduction of new construction materials transform vaulting techniques in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? This book deepens our understanding of the global context of vault construction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, considering different countries and going back to the origins of industrialization. Ten chapters, written by international experts, deal ith different aspects of the construction of vaults in this period. Tile vaults have been a recurrent technique in different countries, and this fact is reflected in several chapters: the tests carried out on tile vaults since the end of the eighteenth century, Guastavino’s relationships with structural engineers, and the spread of the technique in Belgium, Germany and Spain in the twentieth century, are some of the topics addressed. Chapters on the evolution of hollow pot-vaults, the innovations behind Lassaulx and Antonelli’s vaults, and the interaction between roof trusses and vaults in Belgian churches complete the book.
This publication closes off the Marie Sklodowska-Curie post-doctoral fellowship of Paula Fuentes, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 833030. It positions the results of the research project Brick Vaults and Beyond: The Transformation of a Historical Structural System, carried out at the Department of Architectural Engineering, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, in a broad international perspective.