History
Background
Since the dawn of civilization, false domes were built with various materials, including the traditional covers - still in use - of the yurts of Central Asia, the Eskimo igloos, the trulli of southern Italy and the nuraghi of Sardinia.[6] With the increasing use of rectangular rooms, this type of cover was limited to funerary architecture, for example in the tholos. One of the most relevant tholos is the Treasury of Atreus in Mycenae, whose construction is estimated to have taken place in 1250 BC. C. It is a lintel stone construction that therefore constitutes a false dome, with a diameter of 14.5 m. The use of the dome, however, was uncommon in ancient Greece, and it was not until the Roman Empire that the first true domes began to be erected.
Roman empire
In the Roman Empire the dome was used much more frequently. The largest Roman thermal complexes and palaces included domes as roofs. The culmination of the construction of domes in Rome appears in that of Agrippa's pantheon, with a free light that has never been surpassed with traditional techniques and the use of structural steel or reinforced concrete has been necessary to achieve it.
The dome of the Pantheon is hemispherical, made of concrete with tuff rubble and volcanic slag. The external parts of the dome were lined with opera latericia. Bipedal bricks[7] were also used in horizontal layers, like rings.[8] It was the largest dome built at its time, with its 43.44 m diameter, crowned by a large 8.9 m oculus that fills the interior space with light. Structural stability was achieved through the use of concrete, lined with opera latericia,[9] characteristic of Roman architecture, and various techniques to lighten its own weight, either by progressively reducing the thickness of the dome[10] or replacing the travertine with pumice stone in the upper areas.
A perfect sphere can be inscribed inside the building, representing the celestial, along with a whole series of symbolic relationships from the gnomic, geometric and mechanical points of view, which have served as a model for successive generations of architects. The Roman dome, and its early Christian derivative, were almost always built on a dome with a cylindrical shape or prisms with a square, octagonal or dodecagonal base.
Byzantine Empire
In the Byzantine Empire, heir to Roman technological capacity, the construction technique of domes evolved until the structure was imposed on a cube, through the use of transitional architectural elements such as the pendentive, which would lead to the "Trumpet (architecture)"), a conical vault common in Romanesque architecture.
The main example of the period is "Hagia Sophia", the church of Hagia Sophia "Church of Hagia Sophia (Constantinople)") in Constantinople, present-day Istanbul, built in the century under the reign of Emperor Justinian I. The church is a rectangular space measuring 77 by 71 m. The central dome has a diameter of 31.87 m and a height of 56.60 m. It does not have a dome, and is supported by four pendentives and forty perimeter buttresses separated by windows. Together with a series of semi-domes, plus the interior combination of the play of lights with the typical mosaics of Byzantine art, they give a sensation of weightlessness and immateriality, which—in various ways—would constitute the constant search for the sacred architecture of the following centuries.
Another notable building of the period is the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, consecrated in the year 547, which has a central plan with a 16 m diameter dome on pilasters that form an octagonal base. Together with San Apolinario in Class and San Apollinaris Nuevo they constitute the most important group of monuments of late antiquity in Italy, all built since the emperor Honorius designated Ravenna as the new capital of the Western Roman Empire in the year 402. At the same time, with the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, Hagia Sophia also became a model building for the mosques of the Islamic world.
The dome in Islam
The dome, together with the column "Column (architecture)") and the arch "Arch (construction)"), constituted the main architectural element of Islamic art. It inherits from Rome, through early Christian and Byzantine evolution, the cosmological meaning of celestial vault, generally completed with the interior decorative motif of the tree of life, which is represented inverted following the Islamic belief of a perfect symmetry between earth and paradise.
One of the most relevant and earliest examples is the Dome of the Rock, built in Jerusalem by the ninth caliph Abd al-Malik between 687 and 691, covering the rock from where Muhammad is believed to have ascended to paradise. The dome, with a diameter of 21.37 m, rests on a dome or cylindrical drum that serves as a transition to the octagonal base. Each of the vertices of the octagon are oriented according to the cardinal points, and the extrados is covered by sheets of polished and gilded copper that, by reflecting the sun's rays, make this building one of the most beautiful in Jerusalem. From a construction point of view, the dome is characterized by having been made of wood instead of stone, constituting one of the few preserved examples of the Syrian wood tradition. Another circumstance worth highlighting is that it was one of the first examples of a double-layer dome, a system that Brunelleschi would take up in Santa María del Fiore, although using brick voussoirs. While the outer dome has a raised arch profile, the intrados, profusely decorated with tree of life motifs, is perfectly hemispherical.
The Temple of the Rock takes the pilgrim to the circumambulation of the dome along an octagonal route, symbolizing the squaring of the circle, the union of body and soul.
Orthodox domes
According to the Russian historian Boris Rybakov"),[11] the typical onion dome of Russian Orthodox churches has a native origin from pre-Mongol influences, with construction examples from the 12th century onwards,[12] while Mughal architecture and the style spread in Asia by Islam presents its first examples in the 10th century. While in early Russian churches, especially in kyiv, the first capital, the domes followed the model spherical Byzantine style, later buildings began to use onion domes, a shape especially useful to prevent the accumulation of snow in the Nordic climate. Orthodox influence was transmitted to Persian architecture and more eastern regions, as demonstrated by the iconic domes of the Taj Mahal, built in 1630.
The best-known example is Saint Basil's Cathedral, built between 1555 and 1561 in Moscow by order of Ivan the Terrible in commemoration of the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan. Crowned by a total of ten towers with onion domes, the cathedral has been a symbol of Moscow since its creation as a center of synthesis between east and west.
Middle Ages and Renaissance in Western Europe
During the Middle Ages in Western Europe, the ability to build large domes was gradually lost, mainly due to the technical difficulties involved in building increasingly higher and stronger scaffolding, as a way of supporting the dome under construction until its static "closure" by placing the key "Key (architecture)"). However, small and medium-sized domes continued to be built, especially in the most prestigious buildings, such as palatine chapels and cathedrals. During the time of the Crusades, the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, destroyed in the war with the Muslims, was rebuilt using an empirical lintel dome. The influence of this center of Christianity led to its reproduction in several cities in Europe. One of the oldest is preserved in the Baptistery of Pisa,[13] dating back to the 17th century.
The important urban development that occurred after the year 1000 allowed the rapid diffusion of this technique, and consequently vaulted and domed buildings were once again built. From this moment on, the main constructions with domes were built on basilica naves, called "dome". Spontaneously "dome" becomes synonymous with dome, with which meaning the term is used in French and English.
In a competition to create increasingly larger, taller and more majestic buildings, the construction of the cathedral of Santa María del Fiore began in Florence, foreseeing from the beginning the crowning of the apses with a large dome. When the architect Francesco Talenti expanded the floor of the cathedral in the century, no one knew how to build what was planned to be the largest dome until then. It was Filippo Brunelleschi, during the first half of the century, who, after studying Roman architecture, designed a solution that avoided the use of internal scaffolding. The solution consisted of building two domes, one inside the other, which were supported together through a structure of visible reinforcements. This construction system appeared for the first time in Iran in the 2nd century, in the Öldjeytü mausoleum, built between 1302 and 1312 in the city of Soltaniyeh, passing to Egypt in the middle of the same century.
Brunelleschi's solution was the direct inspiration of Michelangelo when he had to design a dome for the most important project of the late Renaissance, St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City. He created a majestic circular dome that dominates the city of Rome and – symbolically – all of Christendom. The robust ribs unload the weight of the structure, allowing better control of the shape and volume of both the external shell and the intrados. The extrados is slightly raised, with the vaguely hyperbolic bracing evidencing the ascending lines of the building.
A curious dome of the century is the flat dome that serves as the floor in the choir of the church of the monastery of El Escorial, whose construction is the same as that of a dome, with voussoirs, but with a flat cross section, a technical boast designed by Juan de Herrera.
Baroque and neoclassicism
The most notable baroque domes in northern Europe were built in Paris and London. Jules Hardouin-Mansart designed the Saint-Louis-des-Invalides church in Les Invalides in Paris in 1670, commissioned by Louis XIV. Its dome, 24 m in diameter, rises on two unusually high domes pierced by large windows that allow an interior resplendent with light.
Christopher Wren's dome for St. Paul's Cathedral in London (1676) incorporates a 30.8 meter inner hemispherical dome, a conical "Cone (geometry)") masonry structure supporting the elevated "Lantern (architecture)" lantern, and a thin outer dome on a wooden structure.
Already in a neoclassical context, the dome of San Francisco el Grande, in Madrid (Francisco Cabezas, Antonio Plo and Francesco Sabatini, 1761-1770) is 33 meters in diameter. That of the Pantheon in Paris, by Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1774-1790), 27 meters.[14] As in revolutionary France, which dedicated the Pantheon to a civic purpose (burial of illustrious men), in the recently independent United States the large domes leave the religious buildings to crown the institutional symbols of democracy, based on the design made by William Thornton for the Capitol in Washington (1792). The dome, reinforced with steel, was completed in 1863; It has a diameter of 27.4 m, and has served as inspiration for numerous state buildings throughout the United States.
20th century
The technological development of the century radically modified the construction criteria of the domes.
Adolf Hitler designed, together with his personal architect Albert Speer, an entire city, Welthauptstadt Germania, whose maximum representation would be in the Große Halle (in Spanish: Great Hall), a colossal structure that would have the largest dome in the world or Volkshalle, 290 meters high,[15][16] so big that there were those who said it would have its own clouds and rain. This was never built, due to the arrival of the war. The geodesic dome, patented in 1947 by the American architect and inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller, consists of the juxtaposition of three-dimensional lightweight modules that generate very stable structures.
The topological generation of geodesic domes is based on Euler's Theorem for polyhedra.
The innovations in the design of reinforced concrete domes introduced by the Italian architect Pier Luigi Nervi from the 1960s allowed the coverage of large spans using coffered slabs and lost formwork. Spectacular advances in steel technology since the end of the century have also allowed the coverage of large spaces without intermediate supports, even in sports stadiums. Tension cable systems, three-dimensional reticulated structures and structural arrangements based on catenaries are used.