National Geographic Article

I read an article from the National Geographic [link here!] that gave a lot of information in regards to the dome of the cathedral. I used information from this article in another one of my posts, but I felt that the article was interesting enough to merit its own post.

From the very first paragraph the article mentions that for decades the church had no complete roof. The dome was the last structural part of the cathedral to be built, and before it was built there was a great big gaping hole. This was actually surprising to me, and does not match the idea in my head of how I thought these sorts of things were built. Maybe the Florence Cathedral was a special case, but leaving something so integral to the entire structure I feel would be nerve wracking for those paying for the church. I mean, imagine if when building the dome it collapsed and damaged other parts of the cathedral? That would have been awful.

Another interesting fact is that when the dome was designed, no one knew how they were going to build it. They basically said "that looks good" without any real consideration of how to construct such a dome. Other cathedrals, especially Gothic cathedrals, used what are called flying buttresses to transfer the load from the dome, or whatever the buttress was attached to, to the ground or another more stable part of the cathedral. The planners of the Florence Cathedral eschewed that idea for what we have now.

The dome that Brunelleschi built actually consists of two domes; an inner and an outer. He basically treated the domes like a barrel and used great big "hoops" to constrain the tendency of the domes to bow outwards. This idea of building the dome in this manner is genius, and I find it a highly interesting piece of knowledge about the building. Brunelleschi seemed to have a solution for every problem that came up, be it the dome or how to even lift the material to where it needed to be in order to build the dome, I find the whole process fascinating.

Information taken from:

Mueller, Tom. "Il Duomo." National Geographic. National Geographic Society, 1 Feb. 2014. Web. 18 Sept. 2014. <http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2014/02/il-duomo/mueller-text>.