History of modern period domes
[4] Beginning in the late 19th century, the Guastavino family, a father and son team who worked on the eastern seaboard of the United States, further developed the masonry dome.
They perfected a traditional Spanish and Italian technique for light, center-less vaulting using layers of tiles in fast-setting cement set flat against the surface of the curve, rather than perpendicular to it.
[6] St. Ursela Parish Church [de] in Munich, Germany, was built between 1894 and 1897 with a dome of two lightweight concrete shells, using reinforcing rings only in the underlying octagonal tambour.
[8] Proportional rules for an arch's thickness to span ratio were developed during the 19th century, based on catenary shape changes in response to weight loads, and these were applied to the vertical forces in domes.
[13] By the 1860s and 1870s, German and other European engineers began to treat iron domes as collections of short straight beams with hinged ends, resulting in light openwork structures.
[15] Rafael Guastavino's use of the recent development of graphic statics enabled him to design and build inexpensive funicular domes with minimal thickness and no scaffolding.
[23] The neoclassical Baltimore Basilica, designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe like the Roman Pantheon for Bishop John Carroll, was begun in 1806 and dedicated in 1821, although the porch and towers would not be completed until the 1870s.
The First Independent (Unitarian) Church by Maximilian Godefroy was begun in 1817 and covered the interior space with a 55 foot wide shallow coffered dome on pendentives with an oculus at the center.
[35] Beginning around 1883, Vasyl Nahirnyi began to combine these traditional forms with the Neo-Byzantine style of Theophil Hansen, "borrowing the motifs of umbrella dome, portico, multi-mullioned windows, and arcaded friezes".
[41] The wrought-iron dome of Royal Albert Hall in London was built from 1867 to 1871 over an elliptical plan by architect Henry Young Darracott Scott and structural design by Rowland Mason Ordish.
[44] The architect, Alessandro Antonelli, who also built the Mole Antonelliana in Turin, Italy, combined Neoclassical forms with the vertical emphasis of the Gothic style.
[45] The 1881 Dutch rebuilding of the Baiturrahman Grand Mosque, destroyed during the Aceh War, introduced the Indian style dome in place of the previous traditional Indonesian tumpanf roof.
[50] In the United States, an 1815 commission to build the Baltimore Exchange and Custom House was awarded to Benjamin Henry Latrobe and Maximilian Godefroy for their design featuring a prominent central dome.
[51] The Coal Exchange in London, by James Bunning from 1847 to 1849, included a dome 18 meters wide made from 32 iron ribs cast as single pieces.
[67] The design for the United States' national capitol building approved by George Washington included a dome modeled on the Pantheon, with a low exterior elevation.
[76] Examples from the Gilded Age include those of California, Kansas, Connecticut, Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Wyoming, Michigan, Texas, and Georgia.
[77] The Reichstag Palace, built between 1883 and 1893 to house the Parliament of the new German Empire, included a dome made of iron and glass as part of its unusual mixture of Renaissance and Baroque components.
[66][84] American state capitol domes built in the twentieth century include those of Arizona, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Idaho, Kentucky, Utah, Washington, Missouri, and West Virginia.
[94] The Guastavino family, a father and son team who worked on the eastern seaboard of the United States, built vaults using layers of tiles in hundreds of buildings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the domes of the Basilica of St. Lawrence in Asheville, North Carolina, and St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
A part-spherical dome, it measures 30 meters in diameter from the top of its merging pendentives, where steel rods embedded in concrete act as a restraining ring.
With an average thickness 1/250th of its span, and steel rods also embedded within the pendentives, the dome "looked forward to modern shell construction in reinforced concrete.
[96] Other examples of ribbed domes made entirely of reinforced concrete include the Methodist Hall in Westminster, London, the Augsburg Synagogue, and the Orpheum Theater in Bochum.
The theory was tested using sheet metal models with the conclusion that the membrane stresses in domes are small with little reinforcement required, especially at the top, where openings could be cut for light.
[103] In 1933–34, Spanish engineer-architect Eduardo Torroja, with Manuel Sanchez, designed the Market Hall in Algeciras, Spain, with a thin shell concrete dome.
A British team of contractors used steel connectors to attach a 115 millimeter thick reinforced concrete dome shell to the outside of the 1870 wrought iron arches.
[106] Aluminum reticular domes allow for large dimensions and short building times, suitable for sports arenas, exhibition centers, auditoriums, or storage facilities.
Geiger's solution to a 90% reduction in the budget for the pavilion project was a "low profile cable-restrained, air-supported roof employing a superelliptical perimeter compression ring".
Its very low cost led to the development of permanent versions using teflon-coated fiberglass and within 15 years the majority of the domed stadiums around the world used this system, including the 1975 Silverdome (168 meters) in Pontiac, Michigan.
[138] The variety of modern domes over sports stadiums, exhibition halls, and auditoriums have been enabled by developments in materials such as steel, reinforced concrete and plastics.
[141] Ōita Stadium was built in 2001 as a mostly fixed semi-spherical roof 274 meters wide with two large membrane-covered panels that can slide down from the center to opposite sides.
