La bóveda sexpartita del Monasterio de Santa María de Huerta, Soria_07 Print E-mail


[....] Amid the voussoirs, due to the fact that their support faces are not radial, the mortar joint must have a triangular form to let the voussoirs' alignment start curving and adapting to the centering. When reaching the keystone, a voussoir specifically cut to fit in the last remaining space works as a connecting wedge between the boss stone and the arch. This wedge is locked in to pressure and makes the whole arch work together with the central key.

The building of the vault is coming to its end; all the main arches, including the side formeret arches, are built (Fig. 35). There is one last task to carry out, the construction of its webs, which is undoubtedly an outstanding challenge because of their complexity. First of all, exact data were collected to determine the main characteristics of the stone masonry work (Fig. 36). They revealed that the webs were carried out with a proper and stone masonry of small size pieces. The courses of stone were placed "the French way", that is parallel to the vault's orthogonal axes, although, in its beginnings, this masonry work is laid out "the English way" seeking the shortest way between two adjacent ribs. The French placement of stone demands to gradually rectify the direction, either with courses of variable width or through wedge - shaped courses, which, in this case, were perfectly identifiable (Fig. 36), as well as the ridge course, a straight course, a lot narrower than the others.

After the data collection, another piece of information was found out: the web courses in this vault are straight, not curved. Most often each course takes the shape of a small arch, so each of them is free standing. This particular fact entails a total change to the building of the web surfaces. Now the courses are not self-supported, they must be held as they are built, especially the upper ones, up to reach the ridge line. That is the moment when the narrow upper course works as a wedge by exerting a lateral compression to the whole web, which makes it perfectly stable. After considering these issues, we proceed to build the masonry web in our vault (Figs. 38-39); and we become aware of the enormous complexity of these surfaces. [....]

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