How Upside-Down Fashions Revolutionized Structure, Making Doable St. Paul’s Cathedral, Sagrada Família & Extra

For 142 years now, Sagra­da Família has been develop­ing towards the sky. Or not less than that’s what it appears to be doing, as its ongo­ing con­struc­tion actual­izes ever extra ful­ly a number of types that feel and appear not fairly of this earth. It makes a sort of sense to be taught that, in design­ing the cathe­dral that may stay a piece in progress close to­ly a cen­tu­ry after his dying, Antoni Gaudí constructed a mod­el upside-down, mak­ing use of grav­i­ty within the oppo­web site method to which we nor­mal­ly consider it as act­ing on a construct­ing. However as archi­tec­ture YouTu­ber Stew­artwork Hicks explains within the video above, Gaudí was exhausting­ly the primary to make use of that tech­nique.

Take St. Paul’s Cathe­dral, which Christo­pher Wren decid­ed to make the tallest construct­ing in Lon­don in 1685. It includ­ed what can be the excessive­est dome ever constructed, at 365 toes off the bottom. “For a tra­di­tion­al dome design to achieve this peak, it must span an open­ing that’s 160 toes or 49 meters vast, however this made it a lot too heavy for the partitions under,” says Hicks. “Exist­ing tech­niques for construct­ing this simply might­n’t work.” Enter sci­en­tist-engi­neer Robert Hooke, who’d already been fig­ur­ing out methods to mod­el forces like this by grasp­ing chains from the ceil­ing.

“Hooke’s genius was that he actual­ized that the chain in his exper­i­ments was cal­cu­lat­ing the per­fect form for it to stay in ten­sion, since that’s all it could possibly do.” He defined domes as, phys­i­cal­ly, “the precise oppo­web site of the chains. His well-known line was, ‘As hangs the flex­ile line, so however invert­ed will stand the inflexible arch.’ ” In oth­er phrases, “in case you flip the form of Hooke’s chain exper­i­ments the wrong way up, the forces flip, and this form is the per­fect com­pres­sion sys­tem.” Therefore the dis­tinc­tive­ly elon­gat­ed-look­ing form of the dome on the com­plet­ed St. Paul’s Cathe­dral, a depar­ture from all archi­tec­tur­al prece­dent.

The form upon which Wren and Hooke set­tled turned out to be very sim­i­lar to what archi­tec­ture now is aware of as a cate­nary curve, a con­cept impor­tant certainly to Gaudí, who was “well-known­ly enam­ored with what some name organ­ic types.” He made detailed mod­els to information the con­struc­tion of his initiatives, however after these he’d left behind for Sagra­da Família had been destroyed by anar­chists in 1936, the builders had noth­ing to go on. Solely in 1979 did the younger archi­tect Mark Bur­ry “imag­ine the mod­els upside-down,” which led to a brand new underneath­stand­ing of the construct­ing’s com­plex, land­scape-like types. It was a sim­i­lar phys­i­cal perception that made pos­si­ble such dra­mat­ic mid-cen­tu­ry construct­ings as Anni­bale Vitel­lozzi and Pier Nervi’s Palazzet­to del­lo Sport and Eero Saari­nen’s TWA Flight Cen­ter: pure Area Age, however root­ed within the Enlight­en­ment.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How the World’s Largest Dome Was Constructed: The Sto­ry of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi and the Duo­mo in Flo­rence

How This Chica­go Sky­scraper Naked­ly Contact­es the Floor

Why Hasn’t the Pantheon’s Dome Col­lapsed?: How the Romans Engi­neered the Dome to Final 19 Cen­turies and Depend­ing

An Archi­tec­tur­al Tour of Sagra­da Família, Antoni Gaudí’s Auda­cious Church That’s Been Underneath Con­struc­tion for 142 Years

A Guid­ed Tour of the Largest Hand­made Mod­el of Impe­r­i­al Rome: Dis­cov­er the 20×20 Meter Mod­el Cre­at­ed Dur­ing the Thirties

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the guide The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­guide.