Unit 8 Video: A Daring Design

Narrator: Imagine this. It’s 1418 in Florence, Italy. You’ve been challenged to build a
great dome for the Santa Maria del Fiore, one of the grandest cathedrals
ever built. And you have no formal architectural training. No pressure, right?

For Filippo Brunelleschi, a goldsmith and clockmaker, it was the opportunity

of a lifetime. He considered the challenge carefully, then proposed a daring
plan, using methods that experts don’t fully understand even to this day.

At the time, domes were often built as semicircles. But the town fathers
required that Brunelleschi build an eight-sided dome. It would also have no
central support system to hold it up during construction. Even worse, the
dome’s base was an octagon with irregular sides and no true center.

But Brunelleschi knew what to do. There would be two domes instead of
one—an inner and an outer shell, connected by brick arches and rings made
of stone and wood. The rings would keep the dome from expanding
outwards.

Brunelleschi also designed innovative machines to lift heavy materials

hundreds of feet up.

Since there was no support system in the center of the dome, the bricks
would have to support themselves during construction. To do this,
Brunelleschi placed the bricks in an unusual way. He used a herringbone
pattern, which ran all the way to the top of the dome, with vertical bricks to
hold the others in place.

The builders laid about one row a week, giving the cement time to dry. At
this rate, the dome grew very slowly, about a foot a month. But how were
the bricks placed so perfectly?

Many experts agree that Brunelleschi used ropes. One theory is that ropes
ran from the work platform to the top of the dome to show where the bricks
should go. Another theory is that ropes ran from the center, forming cones
that grew smaller as they moved to the top. Still another theory suggests
that central ropes were used with wooden structures.

However it was done, it worked. The eight sides of the dome met at the top
perfectly, just as Brunelleschi had planned.

In all, it took 16 years to complete the dome. When Brunelleschi died in

1446, he left behind no drawings and no details as to exactly how he
achieved his masterpiece. Today, it remains the largest brick dome in the
world, more than 500 years after it was built.