La bóveda sexpartita del Monasterio de Santa María de Huerta, Soria_04 Print E-mail

[....] Two interesting observations arouse concerning this fact; first, attention is drawn to the characteristic that all the voussoirs are extremely short; hence its short length makes unnecessary carving them with curvature. It is observed that the voussoir's testa faces are not radial but straight, this is to say that this vault's arches are built using voussoirs that are short and have straight testa faces. Therefore, this is work , though made in stone, closer to brick masonry than to voussoir masonry and, in this context, we could confirm that all the vaults of this period use this same resource (Fig. 12). Secondly, the arches' sophisticated profile, with its protruding central moulding, seemed to suggest a construction strategy already indicated by Fichten: the possible tracking the long succession of voussoirs forming the arch on a double face centering (Fig. 20).

The voussoirs' carving showed interesting information, their form allows to pile them in a perfect way, the pieces match with one another in a way which cannot be accidental. The interest to facilitate and make transport cost efficient is beyond all doubt, since its cost could in many occasions be higher than the vault itself (Fig. 21).

The cross ribbed vaults carried out with short voussoirs is apparently characteristic of the first Gothic style. This technique was gradually abandoned and replaced by the use of voussoirs a lot longer which need to be carved already curved. As suggested in the precedent paragraph, the short voussoirs make the work closer to masonry work: the parts are being placed close to one another and the mortar joint allows giving the alignment of voussoirs the curvature and adapting them to the curvature imposed by the centering. The arches can have different types of curvatures, but the short voussoirs can adapt to all sorts of them. Working with long voussoirs requires knowing precisely the arches' curvature and carving the voussoirs with bebels. If the arches are different, so will the voussoirs' curvatures be. [....]

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