Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[John Oschendorf] When Guastavino died,
he had developed a patent for a monumental structure.
This would have been the largest dome ever in masonry.
On the order of two hundred feet in span,
that would have preserved mortuary remains in the lower
depths of it, so he was thinking about his own mortality.
This was granted after he died.
When he died in 1908, it was suddenly,
it was unexpected.
There were obituaries that were run in Spain where they called
him a "genius inventor among the Yankees" and the "inventor of
the subway arch."
He had achieved a certain level of fame,
and yet because his son was able to carry on the company
seamlessly, many people didn't even know.
The company just continued in the same Spanish-sounding name,
Raphael Guastavino was there to send you drawings,
and many researchers have kind of blurred these two figures,
and in my book I really work hard to separate the father,
who he was, what he did, with the son.
But this project, perhaps more than any,
shows the importance of the company.
In 1909, the son supervises the construction of a temporary dome
over the Cathedral of St. John the Divine,
the Crossing.
And this was like Brunelleschi's dome in Florence where it had
arrived to a certain point and they didn't know how to complete
it, and there were proposals to put steel beams across and just
put a flat roof on top.
And Guastavino, Jr., said I can do that for you,
not only can I do it, I can do it cheaper than anybody else,
and I can do it with no support from the ground.
We're going to come in and like Brunelleschi in Florence,
we're going to build with no support.
Here we see construction photos in the summer of 1909 where the
masons are sitting on the tile laid the day before.
They're building the dome in concentric courses,
and here we see it nearing completion,
building out toward the center.
It was done in only fourteen weeks.
Crowds gathered on the streets of New York.
It was written up in Scientific American as a great achievement
in construction.
This achievement is nearly forgotten today,
and so we're trying to help demonstrate not only their
design prowess but also their construction abilities.
Here we see this.
This was a temporary dome, again four tiles thick at the crown.
This is on the order of the great masonry
domes of the world.
Here we see the Basilica of St. John the Divine.
Three tiles thick at the crown.
I'm sorry, compared to the Florence Cathedral,
the Hagia Sophia, or the Pantheon in Rome.
So you see remarkably thin structure on the same scale.
Really impressive work of structure and masonry and again
I believe underappreciated.
The Guastavino Company around this time
begins to manufacture tiles.
This had been a huge problem.
It was a problem at Biltmore, and
there's some scandalous aspects.
It appears that Guastavino, Sr., tried to double-bill for some
work, and this shows up in the archives,
and he may have been trying to pay for his own home,
but it doesn't strike me that it was just that he had forgotten
that he had already sent one bill.
He seemed to try to be charging twice for the same work.
He was struggling to find tiles to build his projects,
so he built a kiln here at Black Mountain.
He was developing tiles, he was looking for clay sources.
He wanted to build a factory here that would send tile all
over the country.
He traveled as far as Colorado looking for clay.
Accountants who helped them, the Blodgett,
father and son from Woburn, Massachusetts,
convinced them to build a factory just north of Boston
that was on a canal and on a rail line.
So they built this building, designed primarily by the
father, and that allowed them to make polychromatic,
glazed ceramics, beautiful designs,
different colors, different shapes,
different patterns, and that opened up a whole new
possibility for them as designers.
This is 1904.
This is New York City's first subway station,
the City Hall Station.
This project has been closed to the public for sixty years,
and it was closed because the turning radius was too tight,
but you can see what a beautiful station it was.
It allowed natural light.
It's still in remarkable condition.
One day hopefully it could become a museum and really
celebrate the three-dimensional complexity,
and again, there were architect's names assigned to
these projects, but Guastavino, father and son,
were really the creativity behind the geometry,
the detailing, the colors.
So I really try to argue for their authorship
of these designs.
They needed to prove to people that their vaults were strong.
They needed to prove to the New York Department of Building,
so in 1900, here's a vault that they loaded with over a hundred
thousand pounds of lead on top.
So, this allowed them to gain certification
to build their vaults.
Second from the left here is R. G., Sr.,
standing on a test vault for the New York
Department of Buildings that they built a fire in
and let burn for three days.
And the vault went up a little bit,
and then they loaded it again with several hundred pounds per
square foot, and it was fine afterwards.
So they really had good credibility as a fireproof
construction company to prove that not only could they resist
fire, these are like brick ovens, basically,
but also have high load capacity.
Here you see a load test of lead and stone on top of that vault
post-fire to prove that it still wouldn't collapse.
Here's an example of one of those very large domes that the
son was carrying on, and I believe that the son really
played the principle role in building the big domes.
It's unclear to me whether the son was here supervising the
construction at the Basilica or whether the father really
oversaw that.
But as an example, the Museum of Natural History,
the Smithsonian in Washington, is an incredible double dome
with flying buttresses in between.
The Guastavinos, I understand them as being caught between
Medieval master masons and contemporary structural
engineers.
So they have flying buttresses almost like Gothic master
masons, but the son is doing calculations to prove the
stability of his buildings.
The father is not calculating.
We recently learned, colleagues in Spain uncovered,
that the great grandfather of Guastavino, Sr.,
was a Spanish master builder in the 1700s building
huge baroque churches throughout Spain with tile vaults.
That, for me, was the definitive proof that Guastavino, Sr.,
and the whole family, the father and son,
were descended from a long line of master masons.
So they really come to us almost from the Guild Era of the
Gothic, where masters are trained and taught and secrets
are passed on, and that's really what they bring.
And they suddenly arrive in twentieth century America and
are building flying buttresses and national museums,
and so this story is absolutely incredible.
Again, we see the construction of these large domes,
and under that elephant is one of the more remarkable spaces,
the Baird Auditorium, a shallow vault spanning ninety feet,
a really remarkable structure, a load-bearing structure.
So, the next time you're in Washington,
I really recommend visiting that as well.
The son begins to really expand more into public spaces.
The city beautiful movement wanted to beautify public
spaces, so this is the 59th Street Bridge,
made famous by Simon and Garfunkel,
Feeling Groovy, but also developed as a public market,
and today continuing to last as a market.
You pay a small premium for shopping under such a glorious
piece of architecture, but it's worth it.
This is the best place to buy fruit in New York.
This is the Biltmore Hotel in New York City that today is a
steak house.
This was being torn down, and was saved.
The developer tore down the rest of the building but saved the
lobby because of a group of devotees of ceramics in
New York. Astonishingly, right next to this building is a
dry-cleaner, where it has these kind of fascinating curving,
doubly-curved ceilings that are painted white,
and so someday that white paint should be stripped off.
But all over the country, we have beautiful vaults by
Guastavino that have succumbed to a plague of drop-ceilings,
like the one over your head, so when I visit buildings,
I'm often up on ladders lifting up panels of drop-ceilings and
identifying Guastavino vaults underneath,
often mistreated but still there,
waiting to be recuperated.
In looking at construction photos,
I discovered that they often would build the vaults and then
add the facing tile last, working from the center down,
and this photo is proof of that.
So that allowed them to develop beautiful patterns,
and resolve those patterns in a way that's almost too perfect.
In other words, if you tried to build that layer first,
it'd be hard to do.
But by applying it last from underneath,
you could trace it out on the 3D vaulted space.
And the basic construction process was to use the first
layer with gypsum mortar, a fast-setting plaster of paris.
On top of that, to put a thick layer - about an inch thick - of
Portland Cement mortar, embed tiles in that,
and then add an additional layer of Portland Cement underneath.
And then add the extruded joint that projects from the surface
as a final, finishing layer, and those sometimes drop off.
So there were different methods of construction,
and we're still trying to understand them,
but this was one of the common methods I would say by the
nineteen-teens, when they were really doing beautiful
decorative tile work like this in the Holy Trinity Church from
1910 in Manhattan, where you see the resolution and the patterns
of the tile for me are just beautiful.
Many of the projects were done by the son;
I believe he has not gotten enough credit for his work.
He really apprenticed under his father.
This is him around 1925.
When he was doing the Oyster Bar,
problems with the acoustics arose. It was a noisy
space. It's still a noisy space today,
and he developed, together with Wallace Sabine, a Physics
professor at Harvard, some of the earliest acoustical
materials. Guastavino Jr. had four patents on acoustics of
tile vaults by the time he was nineteen years old,
which is not a bad start.
They developed these acoustical tiles.
That allowed them to do installations across the country
in theaters and train stations and churches: the Duke Chapel,
Princeton's Chapel, Riverside Church in Manhattan,
this marvelous train station in Buffalo,
all with acoustical finishes that were more porous tile that
could absorb sound rather than reflect sound.
This is another great Guastavino building that today is actually
abandoned, and is looking for a use.
Another one is the Central Station in Detroit,
which is a magnificent, enormous train station which is also
abandoned, looking for a use.
So if any of you are in the market for a train station...
The Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln really was the
culmination of the decorative possibilities where Guastavino
Jr. worked with a mosaicist, mosaic artist Hildreth Meière.
And she developed cartoons, that you see on the right,
of her designs.
Guastavino Jr. frankly, it seems like he nearly killed himself
developing the...
matching the colors and the sizes to make these.
And this project is simply astonishing,
and is also on the pilgrimage route of Guastavino,
which of course ends in Asheville,
but it has a stop in Lincoln.
If we look at the tiles the company manufactured,
you can see in the early nineteen-teens they were making
almost a million tiles a year.
George Collins literally rescued the company archives from the
dumpster in Woburn in the early 1960s,
got them donated to Columbia, and they contain the order cards
for all of their projects post-1901.
And this reads like a history of the twentieth century in
America: you can see the wars, you can see the Depression,
you can see when the company was booming.
The son retired in 1940, he died in 1950.
The company limped on with the Blodgett family,
the accountants.
The son of Guastavino Jr. dropped out of architecture
school, and so he was not allowed to take over the
company.
And he only died last year or the year before.
So descendents of the Guastavino family are still with us today.
But sadly, the company began to face threats in construction
from thin, concrete structures, which were developed in Germany
in the early part of the twentieth century especially for
planetaria.
So Guastavino, in the 1930s, was building tile vaults for
planetaria, but they were soon replaced by concrete thin
shells.
And in my research I found strong evidence that the
Guastavino vaults were cheaper than the concrete vaults,
but Modernist architects who saw brick and tile as historical
craft materials wanted to use concrete,
saw that as a modern material, a way of the future.
So they overlooked the cost disparities to build in
reinforced concrete.
However, the cost of labor did keep going up,
eventually the cost of construction became too high.
Architectural style changed, and moved toward straight lines and
Modernism: the famous Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 by Mies van der
Rohe is a sleek example of these clean,
straight, horizontal lines.
What the followers of Modernism did not acknowledge is that that
Mies van der Rohe landmark was built on top of tile vaults in
the foundation; they were just hidden from view because they
were curving, so they really didn't fit the orthodox.
But they were the best way to build the foundation.
But the change in architectural style,
the generation of architects who had been calling on Guastavino
died off, the son retired, it came to be seen as a historical
system.
They tried to claim it as modern: they took out ads in the
1920s, they did marvelous interiors of Art Deco
skyscrapers like the Western Union Building in 1929.
But I want to point out that this ad,
it shows a concrete slab with concrete beams,
and then it shows the Guastavino vaults underneath,
not holding up the floor, almost like a tapestry or a finish on
the inside.
So they were moving away from a structural system.
But the company was unbelievably successful: the father and son,
in part because they were innovating - they had 25 patents
- each of those patents had valuable new innovations.
They controlled the process of construction from excavating
clay to shipping it on site and then installing it.
They worked very closely with leading architects: they went in
almost in a no-bid system, so the architects would specify
Guastavino, they would put in a bid,
they had patents that made it sure no one else in the
country was allowed to build Guastavino,
and so they won the bid.
And that meant that, frankly, when the son came time to build
his house, he could build it in Guastavino vaults top to bottom
on Long Island, and he could have a yacht that his son grew
up racing on Long Island Sound.
So the company became millionaires,
the family became millionaires in the nineteen-teens.
But again, this construction system was very versatile,
fireproof, and the Blodgetts brought essential business
skills, because one thing we know: the father had zero
business skills. And this comes through many times.
He was careless with money.
Here's an example of one of their early patents where they
had interlocking tiles, and here's a detail of an arch in
the Boston Public Library showing that system in practice.
They built some of the most daring masonry buildings of all
time: thin, long-span, low-cost structures.
Their decorative possibilities are unique in the history of the
American building arts.
They developed and extended their own styles working with
different architects, and you find them in many of the
country's most important buildings.
And yet, for me, they continue to be unknown and neglected.
This staircase is a marvelous work of structure on the campus
of Carnegie Mellon.
It's been standing for a hundred years.
We do not quite know how it stands up, but it does.
It's a structural surface in three dimensions,
it's a beautiful finish, it's another example of Guastavino
designing it.
I consider this to be a masterpiece,
like the Basilica, of international importance.
But these projects are being torn down,
they're being covered in concrete,
they're being defaced in various ways.
There's a lack of understanding about how they work: if they
develop a crack, as they sometimes do,
is it dangerous?
So we're doing a lot of research at MIT to try to prove that
they're safe, to how to repair them and how to protect them,
and I'll just show you one or two examples.
This is a Cass Gilbert building, which is today the St. Louis Art
Museum, from the 1901 World's Fair.
At some point in the 1930s, a tile fell from the ceiling: a
crack developed, a tile fell, and they declared war on this
vault. They sprayed it with gunite on the interior,
and this vault is a prototype for Ellis Island,
and was completely mistreated in my mind,
not understood.
And so we're still facing a challenge to help demonstrate
that, frankly, the pattern of the tile is an important part of
the art and the craft of these vaults.
But worse than that, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York wanted to put in a new exhibition on top of some
Guastavino vaults.
They called in engineers, and the gentleman on the right in
the suit is the befuddled engineer who has no idea how
this vault stands up, so he tears it down.
He couldn't calculate it, tore out a full bay of vaults in the
Metropolitan Museum, and put in steel beams which he could
calculate.
And so we still face an uphill battle to prove that these
vaults have load capacity.
No Guastavino vault has ever collapsed in service;
tens of thousands of vaults across the country in over a
thousand buildings, and some of the buildings have dozens and
dozens of vaults.
We've been developing methods, calculation methods,
to prove that a spiral stair like this can stand up and has a
high load capacity, but we're still trying to understand how
they work.
And sometimes, the tiles begin to decay: this is the Portico of
Plymouth Rock, right on the ocean,
with sea salt and air, and wetting and drying,
many of the tiles began to decay,
and it was just recently renovated.
And the architect on the project,
Jack Glassman, became so enamored of Guastavino (he was
really afflicted by Guastavin-itis),
that he designed a Guastavino tile tie,
which is a sure sign of a serious infection.
And we hope to sell those one day here in Asheville.
Anyway, this was a gift from Jack Glassman which I'm very
grateful for.
At MIT, we've been trying to identify their projects.
We found over 600 existing buildings;
we discover on the order of one building each month that we
don't know about.
I have a long-standing policy: I will buy any of my students
lunch if they find a building I don't know about.
So I give out free lunches, and that extends beyond my
classroom, so if any of you teach me about a new building,
I will happily buy you lunch.
We've got an interactive Google Map where you can find
Guastavino near you in case you're suffering from
withdrawal, and maybe that will even be an iPhone app before
long. We have a guastavino.net web page.
And we've just received a grant from the National Endowment for
the Humanities for $350,000 - Yeah - to make a
public exhibition on Guastavino vaulting, and to really bring
the story to the American public.
And that exhibition opens at the Boston Public Library September
28th of this year, we'll have a symposium at MIT in November,
and then it will go to the National Building Museum in DC
in the Spring of 2013.
It'll be there for six months, and then it will go to the
Museum of the City of New York in the Fall of 2013,
and after that it will travel.
And we hope that it may be able to come to Asheville and share
the latest international research on Guastavino,
and really help bring the story of this company's remarkable
work. These are some renderings of the design of the exhibition
that will include large-scale color photos of these projects
by Michael Freeman, the really incredible photographer who came
here and fell in love with Asheville,
like we all do.
And collaborated with me on the book and really made the book
what it is, visually appealing, because I know none of you are
going to read the text, but the pictures are great.
So it's important that the pictures are good.
We will build vaults in the exhibition,
leaving them partly finished, helping to demonstrate the
public, and celebrate the masons.
We will work with masons on the project,
and we hope to work with tile manufacturers to show the
decorative possibilities.
But again, as buildings are torn down,
I have a fairly simple policy: if it has a Guastavino vault in
it, we should stop and think before we tear it down.
This is Penn Station in New York,
of course with Guastavino domes.
It was torn down in 1963.
It galvanized the preservation movement in the United States
because when this was torn down, we realized that we had lost
something very special, and it wasn't just the
Guastavino vaults. I want to conclude by saying that,
for me, part of this legacy is a responsibility for us to
understand these vaults, to understand how they work,
and for my students and I, to get dirty and to build vaults.
And really, building vaults has been a joy for us,
and I hope all of you may want to undertake it at some point as
well. A few years ago, an architect in South Africa asked
for a museum that would use these vaults.
And he wanted to use vaults because he wanted to use local
materials, he wanted to use local people,
use passive design strategies.
And because we'd been building them,
this was a very talented architect named Peter Rich,
who developed a vision for the vaults,
came, spent a week at MIT, and we developed the design.
And then other students went to South Africa and helped develop
a design for bricks made from local earth.
This is soil with a cement binder,
a bit of cement added to make bricks.
Local villagers spent a year making these bricks.
A remarkable mason from New Zealand named James Bellamy
helped to train masons to build these arches,
and built a series of Guastavino-style vaults in the
bush, in the remote far-Northeastern
corner of South Africa.
This is a World Heritage Site, the Mapungubwe Visitor's Center,
With long-span tile vaults showing that this technology is
still relevant today to make beautiful spaces,
cost-effective spaces.
We designed and built a series of long-span shells,
domes, and vaults.
And, frankly, were learning as we were going in this project,
but it was a vaulted city that rose up out of the earth using
those local materials.
And to our great surprise, in 2009,
this building was named out of 700 buildings in the world the
"World Building of the Year."
And- [applause]
of all the great coincidences that bring us all
together tonight and of all the fortunate things that Peter
mentioned about this evening, for me,
one of the most remarkable ones is that there was a young
architect working with Peter Rich,
a South African architect, on that project,
named Franz Prinsloo, who was the construction manager for the
architect, he oversaw this project.
Well, that guy fell in love with an American girl,
got married, moved to Western North Carolina,
and is here tonight.
So I want to introduce Franz Prinsloo,
who's in the second row.
If you could just wave.
[applause]
A young South African architect building Guastavino tile vaults
in the bush in Africa now is here tonight with us in
Asheville. So if you want a vault in your house for your
wine cellar or for anything else, please talk to Franz.
And finally, just to close, we had done another project in
England with two shallow domes of tile;
again, a low-energy building made with local materials.
This is operating as a zero-energy building at 80%
lower carbon emissions than conventional construction,
a design that also won a series of international awards for
low-energy, ecologically-sensitive design,
with a green roof on top.
And we really pushed the boundaries of our abilities to
calculate this, and I asked the client not to drive a riding
mower on the top because I thought these shells don't like
point loads. And he thought for a moment, and he said,
"there's a guy up the road that has sheep,
maybe they can come once a month and graze on the roof.
Would that be OK?"
And I said of course, and they'll help fertilize the
grass, so that's a perfect solution.
So that's what I call a sustainable solution,
built with local soil.
This building was designed to have a design life of 500 years,
and to use zero energy.
And came in at a very low cost, and employed local people,
which I think is important.
So, for us, these methods are not dead.
The Guastavino construction company may be gone,
but there are still things we can learn from them.
And as proud as we were of this design and our shallow vaults
that we build on these domes that challenged me and a whole
team of MIT graduate student engineers to prove to calculate
that this thing worked, I then found a little bit later a vault
by the Guastavino company on the campus of Yale University of a
longer span, a 50-foot span with a 29-inch rise with no steel in
it, half the rise of our vault.
In other words, we could barely prove that this vault on the
right worked, with the most advanced engineering computer
programs we could write and we could conceive of,
and they had built, a century earlier,
a vault that I simply cannot fathom.
And I hope Yale doesn't call me to prove that this vault stands
up; it does, of course, but the point is what they were doing
was so far ahead of their time, we are still struggling to
understand how these buildings work and how to care for them
properly.
And I just want to finish and say what an incredible pleasure
and honor it is to be here tonight,
and I couldn't be happier with seeing so many of you here,
and I hope some of you are also infected with Guastavin-itis.
Thank you.
[applause]
Thank you so much, that's very kind.
I know some people may have to leave,
but I'm happy to answer questions if anyone would like.
I saw yours first.
(audience member) So, the question of the hour is: could
nearby construction damage the Basilica here?
[John Oschendorf] The question, for those of you who
didn't hear it, is "could nearby construction damage the
Basilica?"
A masonry shell like the dome, a thin masonry tile vault like
that, is capable of withstanding some movements in the supports.
And those can lead to some cracking,
but the thing to do, as we're doing on other projects,
other Guastavino projects with nearby construction around the
country, is to put a limit on the amount of movement that can
occur and to monitor it throughout construction and to
make sure those limits aren't exceeded.
So, the answer is, is it possible to build nearby and
guarantee zero movement to the building (and I'm speaking as an
engineer now)?
The answer is no.
Is it possible to say there are safe limits to how much movement
we would allow to occur and to be exceedingly careful during
construction and monitor that?
The answer is probably yes, but I would advise that the
movements be kept to very, very small values because even small
movements can lead to cracking and damage.
So, almost anything is possible today technologically.
What it would cost financially is another question.
But yes, we do not want large movements of the foundations of
an important landmark like the Basilica.
Uh, I saw a question here.
Oh, then that does appear to be the question of the day! Sir.
(audience member) Yeah, you mentioned and showed a picture
of his house in Black Mountain.
And I was just wondering, you may have mentioned this as well
and I missed it, but did it not burn down?
Was that not ironic that he built it out of wood and it
burned down, or how did-
how come it's not still there, I guess?
(John Oschendorf) Yeah, there's certainly irony there.
There are others in the room who know more about Rhododendron and
its history, but it basically fell into disrepair,
and was abandoned for some years.
And yes, there's some irony that it burned down, but-
Peter. It didn't burn down.
[Peter] There was a fire, and Mrs. Guastavino was burned in
that fire. But it did not burn the building down.
[John] Okay. Thank you. Peter clarifies: there is a fire.
She is burned, the wife of Guastavino who continues to live
on for many decades (she was somewhat younger than him).
Yeah - was burned.
But the short answer is that they also had a fire in their
company, in their factory in Woburn.
And that was more ironic to me that the fireproof construction
factory had a big fire, and the media laughed about that and
made snide remarks in the press about it.
But, you know, I think this building was an important
building of the time, and there are so many questions I have
about it, but again I think there are things waiting to be
written and more things waiting to be done on studying
Rhododendron.
And a reporter, who may be here tonight,
you may be him, is currently working on an article on
Rhododendron.
So I think there's much more to learn here,
but as far as we know, primarily wood construction,
fell into disrepair, and was eventually torn down.
[audience member] I think there might be a chimney still
standing there and the wine cellar is still-
[John] A chimney from the kiln, a kiln, with the wine cellar,
and it's on the National Register.
So there's a little bit there. Yes, sir?
[audience member] Uh, you mentioned there were six
hundred buildings in the US and Canada.
Did Guastavino and Co.
do any buildings in Europe?
You might expect some migration back to the continent of this
wonderful technique.
[John Oschendorf] Yeah, so, did he do any buildings in Europe?
The company did projects in eleven countries.
They did projects in Panama, and Mexico...
they did a project for a parliament building in India.
They did not do additional projects...
oh, I'm sorry, they did one major factory in Spain,
a cement factory in the early 1900s,
where Guastavino helped develop the design,
a Spanish architect/engineer signed the drawings,
but I'm convinced it was a Guastavino project.
But in general, no, not much practice in Europe.
He may have wanted to avoid Spain for various personal
reasons, but he never went back to Spain.
The son went back, the son rebuilt connections to the
family, but there were architects in Spain who could
build, and who I believe were influenced by Guastavino in the
Catalan Art Nouveau movement of Gaudí and his era,
who went on building tile vaults,
some really remarkable tile vaults.
But the Guastavino company, as far as we know,
did not do other buildings in Spain apart from that cement
factory.
Thank you. Yes, ma'am?
[audience member] This is related to the first question.
Are you aware that, in the 70s, the open cut,
the I-240, the -
the mountain of Beaucatcher was blasted within line of sight of
the St. Lawrence?
And you talked about the possibility of movement hurting
that dome.
Well we had about two years of blasting,
they literally blasted a mountain out,
and you can see the mountain, or the open cut from St. Lawrence.
[John Oschendorf] I'm not aware of that.
Let me just make one comment: all great masonry buildings of
the world, the great cathedrals of Europe,
the Pantheon in Rome, they have cracks in them.
Small movements occur, buildings crack over time.
Normally, the cracks aren't a problem.
The Basilica of St. Lawrence has some cracks in it.
They don't worry me, but understanding the history of
when things occur, it's hard to know unless they're documented,
which is why it's important that we document them and pass them
on for future generations, and have surveys.
And one of the things we've been working on is doing laser scans,
and making virtual models of buildings that are accurate to
within a millimeter so that people can have reference points
decades into the future to know where things were.
And, in fact, the reason that the Leaning Tower of Pisa was
saved recently was because we had eight centuries of data on
its lean, and we knew that it was continuing to lean.
So it's important to take measurements and monitor,
but right now, the Basilica as far as I'm concerned is in
marvelous shape.
But it's our responsibility to really preserve it for future
generations, because this story, the story of Guastavino,
the story of the Basilica, is bigger than any one of us in
this room, and it really belongs to all of humanity,
it belongs to the future and the history of the world.
So I just think it's incredibly important.
And maybe a sign of the interest in the topic is how many of you
are here tonight.
And I'm now beginning to understand you're actually not
so interested in Guastavino, but you're so interested in the
Basilica. Which is marvelous.
Because the Basilica really is a world treasure,
and deserves to be treated that way.
Yes.
[audience member] I guess from what you said tonight that if
you see something that looks like a Guastavino vault,
it probably is a Guastavino vault.
We were in Quebec City last summer,
and right in -
[John] You were where?
[audience member] Quebec City.
[John] Okay.
[audience member] And right in front of the Chateau du
Frontenac, there's like this gated entrance.
And I looked up, and I said, "Hey,
that looks like, y'know, the Oyster Bar,
or the gatehouse at the Biltmore."
And I went inside and I asked them "is that a Guastavino
vault?", and nobody knew what I was talking about.
So I said, "well, do you have a historian here at the Chateau
that can..."
and they sent me to the concierge,
the concierge had no idea.
Is there anything that you're doing actively to try and
educate the people who are intimately involved with these
vaults about what they have?
(John Oschendorf) That project was built by Guastavino in 1921
for architect Edward and W.S. Maxwell.
It's in the back of the book.
But that list in the back of our book is the list that we know
of, it's constantly evolving: that's why we're putting it
online. But it is an uphill battle, and part of what we're
doing. I really appreciate your question because it reminds me
that as part of our publicity for the exhibition,
and as part of our mailings, we need to send mailings to every
building that we have on our list,
because in some places there are people who are extremely
knowledgeable, extremely interested in Guastavino,
and in other places the response is the one that you got,
which is "Gusta who?"
So thank you for that, we definitely should make sure part
of our outreach for the exhibition is to reach out to
each of those buildings.
And many of them, I'd say I'm in regular contact with the owners
and clients and operators of probably 100 of the 600
buildings, but we need to be in contact with all of them.
Because not everybody knows what they have.
That's great, thank you.
Keep spreading the word!
[audience member] Yeah, I wonder if Brunelleschi used this
similar technique in building the Dome in Florence.
[John Oschendorf] There are multiple ways that the dome of
Santa Maria in Florence is similar to Guastavino.
One is that it was built with no support from underneath,
so building in concentric rings.
The other one for me is its complex,
curving geometry, and the bricks are laid in a herringbone
pattern.
If you've climbed up that dome and seen that marvelous
herringbone, it relates.
But it's a different technology in that the bricks are not the
same thin brick laid on edge, and so it has many affinities,
but I would not say it's part of the exact -
it's part of the broader tradition of building with no
form work, in brick, but I do not believe it is the
particular tile technology that we have.
But Guastavino Sr. writes about that vault at length in his
book. So he studied it, he knew about it,
he draws it in that marvelous 1893 book that some of you are
looking to find a copy of (remember to call me).
He draws it, the cross-section, in there.
So he studied the works of the masters,
he studied that dome.
So it had an indirect influence, but not a direct influence.
Good question.
Pack Library has a copy of his book.
Let's make sure it stays in limited access and is treated
with care.
Yes?
[audience member] So, part of the popularity of Guastavino was
that his vaults were fireproof.
And I'm curious to know if you've ever looked into some of
the buildings from, y'know, way back,
compared to how they withstood earthquakes that may have hit.
[John Oschendorf] Yeah, we do a lot of work on earthquake
resistance of historic masonry buildings.
And it's a field that we're still just beginning to
understand, but we're making some progress.
And after that surprise in Virginia last year - some of the
vaults were shaken in the state of Virginia - so I've been going
around inspecting vaults that have some cracks in them.
But in general, these vaults -
there are vaults in San Francisco from the early 1900s
that have survived many earthquakes,
so there is capacity for earthquakes,
and they tend to be fairly lightweight structures,
but let me just say we're only beginning to understand that.
[audience member] But I mean in comparison to the other
buildings. [John] Oh, yeah, I think it's an open question.
We find examples in history of builders and regions developing
a knowledge about how to build against earthquakes,
but how exactly Guastavino vaults tie into that I'm not
sure. But I would say it is an important question because there
are earthquakes in many places where there are Guastavino
buildings, and one nice thing could be to begin instrumenting
more buildings so that as they move,
we get measurements of how they're moving,
and how they're vibrating, and how they're breathing throughout
the seasons, and that teaches us something about how they're
behaving.
So I'd say we're in our infancy, but we're learning how these
buildings work.
And that's really what's been fun about working at MIT as an
engineer is that there are great technical challenges that are
exciting.
Yes?
[audience member] With the potential that this technology
has for off-the-grid structures, I wonder how large a master
mason's program may be being developed at MIT or elsewhere,
not only to be able to preserve Guastavino,
but to make the most of this technology?
[John Oschendorf] That's a great question.
We're doing a number of workshops to build vaults with
small groups of people, and if anyone's interested,
I could help connect you with those over the next few years.
So I think we are training, unlike maybe even just a couple
decades ago there was a great mystery about these vaults,
and how exactly they were built, and y'know,
some of that mystery still survives today.
But having had the dirt under my fingernails and having built a
few vaults, I think we understand them now.
We're not at the level of what they could do,
but we're trying to begin to recover that.
So there are some opportunities, but I don't know if the demand
is quite enough to sustain a university of tile vaulting,
as much as I'd like to found that someday.
But anyway, it's a great question,
and I would say there is potential for anyone in the room
to learn how to build one.
One of the great joys of writing this book is that I get letters
from people.
I just got a letter from a 75-year-old gentleman in
Southern California who said, "I liked your book so much,
I decided to build a vault in my garden,
and sent me a picture of him standing on top of a Guastavino
tile arch that he built.
And that warms my heart.
So I look forward to getting similar letters and pictures
from you.
And I forgot to mention that there are only thirteen shopping
days left until Valentine's Day, and there is a
bookseller on hand who's willing to sell copies.
I think he brought twenty of them,
and I'm happy to sign them.
And I guess I'd like to draw things to a close here,
and so I'd be happy to stay and answer questions and talk if
anyone wants to.
But again, what a privilege it is to be here.
I adore Asheville, and my wife, of course,
wants us to retire here.
And I say, "Hon, y'know, that's not a new idea.
Guastavino had that idea."
But anyway, we may join that bandwagon someday.
But it's really a great, great pleasure to be here,
and I'm just so thrilled.
And I want to thank all of you so much for coming,
I want to thank Cynthia again for making this possible,
and I look forward to returning to Asheville many more times in
the future.
Thank you so much, good night.