The Calculus Diaries - Jennifer Ouellette [84]
All told, Gaudi worked on the cathedral for forty-three years, twelve of them devoted exclusively to the project. For the last years of his life, he actually lived in the structure’s crypt. Poor Gaudi met with an ignominious end: He was run over by a tram on June 7, 1926, while walking to the construction site, and he was so raggedly dressed that nobody recognized the famous architect. (Several taxi drivers refused to drive such a vagabond to the hospital, and were later fined by municipal police for their refusal to assist the injured man.) He wound up at a pauper’s hospital, and although his friends tracked him down a day later and tried to move him to a better facility, Gaudi refused, declaring, “I belong here among the poor.” He died three days later and was buried within the Sagrada Familia.
No doubt Gaudi would be gratified to learn that his masterpiece is nearing completion. Jordi Bonet, director of La Sagrada Familia since 1985, has said the interior will be completed in 2010, with plans to mark the occasion with the celebration of Mass in the main nave. After that, only one last tower must be built: the 550-foot-tall Tower of Jesus, slated for completion in 2026.51 At least part of the delay was due to the fact that contractors initially couldn’t figure out how to physically build some of the bizarre structures Gaudi designed on paper. And not only did Gaudi invent his own system for calculating his catenary shapes, he did those calculations without the benefit of modern computers.
WALKING ON EGGSHELLS
John Ochsendorf remembers the first time he stood on top of the domed vault of the chapel at King’s College, Cambridge. “You’re standing eighty feet off the ground on a thin piece of stone,” he recalls. “You can even feel small vibrations. And you can’t help thinking, ‘The nerve of these people!’ ”
Ochsendorf is a structural engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a historian of architecture and construction. “These people” are the long-dead members of England’s masonry guild who built the chapel roof around 1510. It’s not difficult to see why he is so impressed with their engineering skills: The chapel’s roof spans nearly 15 meters, yet it is only 10 centimeters thick—similar to an eggshell in terms of its radius to thickness ratio. “These [early arch builders] developed a very real science of construction to attain a high degree of stability,” says Ochsendorf. “I’m simply in awe of the fact that we haven’t surpassed it yet.”
Modern architects have devised their own tricks of the trade. Like Gaudi before him, contemporary Swiss architect Heinz Isler creates what he calls reversed “hanging membranes” to design the delicate, thin-shelled dome structures for which he is justly famous. After pouring liquid plastic onto a cloth resting on a flat, solid surface, he lowers the surface, leaving the plastic-covered cloth to hang in pure tension, suspended from its corners. The plastic hardens, freezing that position. Once it has dried, Isler turns the solid shell model upside down, and that form becomes the basis for his design—a form of experimental calculus.
Ochsendorf’ s work is aimed at adapting a popular computer graphics tool to help unlock the elusive secrets behind the arches and domes of Gothic cathedrals. Along with his then-graduate student, Axel Kilian, Ochsendorf adapted a technique called particle-spring