Domes

The domes of Florence offer a big architectural system to be investigated, and its big heritage value has brought to an investigation, which moved from general aspects to particular ones. It started from the accurate cataloguing of all of the churches' domes in Florence, and it focused on the analysis of one of the most important artist of the Italian renaissance: Filippo Brunelleschi. The study of life and works of this architect was conducted through the documents, which are preserved at the Opera del Duomo, through

As a covering method of buildings` roof, domed roof have mostly been applied in Iran and other countries according to adobe material abundance comparing with timber ones. Furthermore, dome remains in first place in architectural designs due to their favorable thermal performance; so that it has been widely utilized in mosques, shrines, churches, bazaar and schools construction. On this account, the current research studies on the role of shape in roofs energy loss specifically in cold annual period to achieve the optimized form. The paper discusses a comparison to four types of roof (slab and three types of dome) in hot and dry climatic zone of Iran, Esfahan city. The research method is based upon modeling and simulation. It is to find the most efficient form of buildings which can be designed in contemporary architecture of developing countries. The result shows that although the flat shape roof appears in an appropriate thermal performance, there is a meaningful correlation between roofs total volumes and heating load at night, however the result is in need of further investigation.

This book deals with the general concepts in stereotomy and its connection with descriptive geometry, the social background of its practitioners and theoreticians, the general methods and tools of this technology, and the specific procedures for the members built in hewn stone, including arches, squinches, stairs and vaults, ending with a chapter discussing the open problems in this field. Thus, it can be used as a reference book in the subject, but it can also read as a compelling narrative on this subject, one of the main branches of pre-industrial technology. 

Construction in hewn stone requires the use of geometrical methods and tools to assure that individual stones, either blocks or voussoirs, fit with one another and conform to the general shape of walls, arches or vaults. During the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, such techniques and instruments were developed empirically by masons and architects. Later on, learned mathematicians and engineers introduced refinements in these procedures and this branch of knowledge, known as stereotomy, furnished much material to descriptive geometry, a science born with the French Revolution which provided the foundation for projective geometry.

Domes are one of the oldest structural forms and have been used since the earliest times. The present work is concerned with a systematic investigation of the problem of configuration processing for grid domes and geodesic forms. To deal with the problem of data generation for grid domes a special transformation is evolved. This enables configurations to be projected on different surfaces, such as spheres, ellipsoids, paraboloids, hyperbolic paraboloids and cylinders. The transformation is referred to as the "tractation retronorm". To explore the range of possibilities of shapes and forms four types of projections have been used. These are central, parallel, axial and radial projections. The tractation retronorm allows a grid dome to be generated from a concise and yet readily understood formulation. Space structures have received a great deal of publicity during the last decade. This noticeable trend towards three-dimensional structures is partly due to a reaction from the linear Systems of the previous decades, but largely due to the realization of the structural advantages of space Systems, their inherent lightness combined with great stiffness.

The basilica of Santa Maria del Lauro in Meta (Naples) is a centuries-old structure that over time underwent several transformations. The fifth reconstruction of the religious building, which took place in the second half of the 16th century, is particularly interesting to investigate. Apart from some changes due to restoration works, its current structure,
with the characteristic domes, dates back to that period. As part of a wider research, this paper aims at deepening the knowledge about the events related to the construction of 16th-century dome structures in the Sorrento Peninsula, of which the building analyzed represents a relevant case study. Starting from a broader glance on the whole building, the paper highlights the diachronic evolution of the domes in their material conditions through the cross reading of bibliographical and archival sources.

Any analysis performed to gather data about architectural and urban heritage always begins with the observation of reality and the involvement established between the observer and the space around them. A spectator inevitably interprets what they see in a personal manner so as to give objects a specific meaning. The ability to understand the data and the relationship between the parts and then assign it a value varies from person to person. That the mind can mediate the mental processes of perception-action-thought means that any direct analysis to understand a cultural asset is scientifically extremely important. The critical process sparked by an on-site study exploits the concise graphic transcription of what is visible, including the graphics tool used to achieve that representation. This contribution will present a study performed by the author to gather data using the drawings of several domes in the historical centre of the city of Rome.

As a covering method of buildings` roof, domed roof have mostly been applied in Iran and other countries according to adobe material abundance comparing with timber ones. Furthermore, dome remains in first place in architectural designs due to their favorable thermal performance; so that it has been widely utilized in mosques, shrines, churches, bazaar and schools construction. On this account, the current research studies on the role of shape in roofs energy loss specifically in cold annual period to achieve the optimized form. The paper discusses a comparison to four types of roof (slab and three types of dome) in hot and dry climatic zone of Iran, Esfahan city. The research method is based upon modeling and simulation. It is to find the most efficient form of buildings which can be designed in contemporary architecture of developing countries. The result shows that although the flat shape roof appears in an appropriate thermal performance, there is a meaningful correlation between roofs total volumes and heating load at night, however the result is in need of further investigation.

The aim of this paper is to establish a general methodology of approach to assess the safety of the architectural heritage. Starting to a "case study", the problem of the behavior analysis of masonry buildings has been developed on the basis of some simple hypotheses about the material and on the basis of theoretical concepts. The Elastic Theory, used to check modern structures, is not suitable for masonry, material much more heterogeneous and complex. As demonstrated by the ancient builders, the most appropriate theory to study historical constructions is the Limit Analysis [1]: a better understanding of the mechanics for these structures is needed, since it is not the stress the most important parameter for masonry, but it is the stability [2]. The case approached deals with the dome of the Basilica of San Francesco di Paola in Naples, designed and built by the Swiss architect Pietro Bianchi in the nineteenth century, for the royal will of Ferdinand IV of Bourbon [3,4]. In order to assess this structure, the limit analysis approaches are here compared and, on the basis of classical limit analysis, local mechanisms are considered. A static (safe theorem) and a kinematic approach are applied to the structure by means of equilibrium limit conditions and kinematically admissible collapse mechanisms.

In this essay we point out the important role that churches play in the baroque city and in a territory of great landscape value, especially with their architectural elements such as domes. In seventeenth and eighteenth century almost every church has its dome that stands out on the surrounding urban texture and marks it. For instance, in Naples the domes of the Spirito Santo, Santa Maria della Sanita, Annunziata, etc and also smaller domes that have a particular value by having place in landscapes that have stayed upright in more than two centuries. Moreover, domes in Campania mark many sites of great landscape value such as Sorrento and Amalfi coast, where in particular majolica surfaces assume important figurative values bound to the strict relation between architecture and nature. We developed topics about building technics of domes and especially about majolica (riggiole) facings derived from the Spanish Arabic tradition.