Abstract

The vault of the Arles City Hall, or Hôtel de Ville, represents the architect’s revenge on the corporations of masons. Completed in 1676, the relationship of span to rise of the vault make it the boldest work of masonry in Europe, and while this complex vault appears to be a unitary structure, two vaults actually share the work, leaning against each other on the big arch. Bibliographic and archival research showed that surveys of the vault were missing; the only ancient survey was lost in the 1970s. A recent survey campaign made an analysis possible, leading to a hypothesis about the architect Mansart’s choices, based on hypothetical solutions to resolve the formal construction issues of the vault. A connoisseur of geometry and optics, Mansart knew that the human eye was unable to perceive the exact geometry of a surface. Knowing that he couldn’t control the intersections of vault portions and then the joints of the rows in the space, he introduced a solution that involved drawing the intersections in plan and then projecting them on the vault to obtain the spatial intersections. No further constructions of the bold type followed the vaulted space in the Hôtel de ville, because the spatial research that linked the new discipline (stereotomy) to the quality of architectural space had by then come to an end.

Autore Pugliese

• Fallacara Giuseppe

Tutti gli autori

• FALLACARA G , RESTA F. , SPALLUCCI N. , TAMBORERO L.

Titolo volume/Rivista

NEXUS NETWORK JOURNAL

Anno di pubblicazione

2011

ISSN

1590-5896

ISBN

Non Disponibile

Numero di citazioni Wos

Nessuna citazione

Ultimo Aggiornamento Citazioni

Non Disponibile

Numero di citazioni Scopus

Non Disponibile

0

Ultimo Aggiornamento Citazioni

2017-04-23 03:20:56

Settori ERC

Non Disponibile

Codici ASJC

Non Disponibile