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The four arches are two bricks thick while the dome is only one brick.
Plaster of Paris is the only binding agent.
"interior" view of the vault
 stringently-controlled
load testing revealed that the dome easily carried a distributed load
of 1,200 lbs.
methods were derived from Guastavino's own
means of load-testing
under construction
 underside
underside, again
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CONSTRUCTION OF A VAULT
Even though no english language manuals of timbrel vault construction
exist, MIT student Michael Ramage spent a weekend building a small vault
of his own.Michael's vault spans six feet by six feet and though it
was his first attempt to build a masonry vault, he finished it in only
one weekend.
Several fruits of the effort included a paper describing the process,
a movie which details the construction process and structural experimentation.
The movie can be viewed in quicktime format and the text downloaded
as a pdf.
Quicktime Movie of Vault Construction (Quicktime 1.5M)
Construction of a Catalan Vault Process (pdf)
Construction of a Catalan Vault Text (pdf)
Digital model of vault (dxf)
For more information you may contact Michael directly (mramage@mit.edu).
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