CATALAN (GUASTAVINO) VAULTS

This historic vaulting technique, popular in Spain and the United States in the early 20th
century, is also called “cohesive construction,” “timbrel vault,” “laminated vault,” voûte Rouss ilon (in
France), bóveda tabicada (“board vault,” in Spain), and volta a foglia (“layered vault” in Italy). It uses thin, flat clay
tiles (about 12 by 6 by 5/8 inches) in laminated shell structures, assembled with an
extremely adhesive and fast-drying mortar into vaults, normally in three or more layers of
overlapping tiles. The enormous stability stems from two major factors: the convergence
of the tiles and mortar into a homogeneous, monolithic material that can absorb both
compression and tension and the thin (single or double) curved surfaces that obtain
additional strength by distributing them sideways as well as downward. Apart from being
fireproof, the vault is lighter than any other masonry vault and produces only minimal
lateral thrust at its springing points. As a result, it allows the placement of openings in the
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shell and the easy combination of several units and does not require outside buttressing or
reinforcement beams. Skilled workers can erect even large vaults without scaffolding or
formwork, as the lower rows of laminated clay tiles are usually strong enough when the
mortar has dried to carry the workers placing subsequent layers.
The roots of this vaulting technique can be traced back to medieval and even Roman
sources. The structure would typically be hidden from sight under plaster or suspended
ceilings or used as permanent formwork. The late 19th century developed a new interest
in the technique, which eventually flourished simultaneously in the first half of the 20th
century both in Catalonia, Spain, and in the United States.
In the 1860s it was rediscovered in Catalonia as a cheap method of vaulting spaces for
industrial buildings and warehouses. A prime example is the factory (1869–75; today
called The Clock Building) for the Battlò brothers in Barcelona by Rafael Guastavino.
Father and son Rafael Guastavino exhibited the method with great success at the
Philadelphia World’s Fair and subsequently proceeded to introduce the technique to the
United States. The Guastavino Company (1885–1963) held 24 patents and was involved
in the construction of more than 1,000 buildings all across the United States, Canada, and
11 other countries. During the 40 most active years of the company, the Guastavinos
worked on some of the most spectacular public buildings of the day, including the Boston
Public Library (McKim, Mead and White, 1898), Grand Central Terminal (Warren and
Wetmore, 1913), and Pennsylvania Station (McKim, Mead and White, 1911) in New
York, as well as private commissions, including the Biltmore Estate (Richard Morris
Hunt, 1895) in Asheville, North Carolina. The widest span ever to be achieved with
Guastavino tiles is the 66-foot-wide dome above the crossing of the cathedral of St. John
the Divine (Cram and Ferguson, 1893 and later) in New York. Although American
architects used Guastavino tiles mostly for conventional vaults and domes in historicist
architecture, they frequently chose to expose the typical fish-grate pattern of the tiles on
the underside of a vault or dome without any ornamental embellishment. These patterns
can still be found in countless public structures.
Simultaneously, the method gained popularity among the architects of the Catalan Modernismo
movement in northeastern Spain. (Although several medieval applications in Catalonia
are known, there is no evidence that the method was exclusive to this region or had
originated there.) Fired by a search for an independent Catalan architectural expression,
several architects fully exploited the technique’s structural and expressive potential for
complex vaults, undulating walls, and rolling ceilings. Among the prime examples are
Antoni Gaudí’s small school building (1906) at the Sagrada Familia cathedral in
Barcelona, which features both a curvilinear outside wall and a wavelike roof structure.
Gaudí’s contemporary, Lluis Domènech i Montaner, used the technique in the Palau de la
Música Catalana (1905–08) and his Hospital de Sant Paul (1902–10), both in Barcelona.
Cèsar Martinell built more than 30 agricultural cooperatives using the tiles in Catalonia
between 1913 and 1919, and Lluís Muncunill i Parellada created perhaps the most radical
application of the technique in his textile factory, Aymerich Amat i Jover (1907–09) in
Terrassa, Catalonia, which features series of double-curved roof elements on cast-iron
posts that both shelter the interior and provide northern skylights.
Eventually, the use of the technique succumbed to rising labor costs and new, cheaper
building methods that began to dominate the building markets in the Western world after
World War II. There were only occasional later applications, as in Luis Moya Blanco’s
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St. Augustin church (1954) in Madrid or Le Corbusier’s use of simple, flat Catalan vaults
in his Maison Jaoul (1955) in Paris.
The two most spectacular applications since World War II have occurred outside the
highly industrialized Western building markets. A Catalan mason brought the vaulting
technique in the late 1950s to Cuba, where it was applied to the first major building
project of Fidel Castro’s government, a cluster of five art schools (Ricardo Porro, Vittorio
Garatti, Roberto Gottardi, 1961–65, unfinished) featuring spectacular sequences of domes
and barrel vaults.
The Uruguayan architect Eladio Dieste (b. 1917) has continuously applied
the central principles of the Catalan vault since the late 1950s and
improved it structurally by using steel reinforcement rods and tie bars in
conjunction with doublecurvature brick shells, thus increasing the span of
each unit. Among Dieste’s most stunning creations is a church (1958) in
Atlantida, Uruguay, with undulating walls and ceiling based on a principle
similar to that of Gaudí’s school at the Sagrada Familia.

Palau de la Música Catalana,
Barcelona (1908), designed by Lluis
Domènech i Montaner
Equally important is a warehouse (1960) in Montevideo that is spanned by double-curved
laminated shell structures similar to those in Lluis Muncunill’s 1909 textile factory in
Terrassa. The thin laminated masonry vaults have influenced the development of thin
concrete shells (for example, in the work of Spanish architects Edoardo Torroja and Felix
Candela) and Russian experiments with large vaults of prefabricated-concrete elements.
A renewed interest in the technique has led to attempts at reviving the vaulting technique
for the Western building market.