Raphael Gustavino’s Craftsmanship
About Gustavino
One of the most remarkable men whose work appears at the Custom House is Raphael Gustavino, the architect and engineer of the great Rotunda dome, the grand staircases, and timbrel arches of the driveways. He was born in Barcelona, Spain, and studied architecture there. Gustavino was interested early in the ancient Catalan system of spanning with vaults of thin tile. His studies of Roman vaulting convinced him of the preferability of a system that depended upon the strong cohesion of light elements, rather than on gravity-friction-held elements which had been used from Roman times onwards. The gravity-friction system employed a keystone, and its lateral thrust had to be taken up by very strong walls, sometimes needing buttressing.
Coming to the United States in 1881, Gustavino devoted years to understanding American structural materials and the building community. When he found he was unable to establish himself as an architect, he became a contractor. His system required thin flat tiles of great strength, and cement, neither of which was as yet available in a developed form. By 1885, he had taken out the first of his many patents, and was developing or finding the materials he needed.
Gustavino was carefully building his reputation. In 1885, he gained national exposure for his acclaimed work on the Boston Public Library alongside McKim, Mead and White. In 1889, he lectured at MIT and several years later published a book on his system. In 1900, Gustavino opened his own tile manufacturing plant in Woburn, Massachusetts, which supplied his projects. Over time his company closed, having installed Gustavino’s version of Catalan vaulting in over 1,000 buildings.
Gustavino and Catalan Vaulting
Gustavino’s thin shell vaulting derived its rigidity from the type of curvature pieced together with an amazingly tenacious mortar, which accounted for about 50% of the mass. The tiles were laid and laminated by skilled workers in careful patterns so that the joints below were covered by tiles above. In domes, the tiles were laid in concentric rings. The arched vaults needed no centering, or wooden formwork, as the quick drying cement supported itself. It was also fire proof, and extremely light weight, durable, and decorative finishes could be applied directly to the tiles, or, as in the case of the Boston Public Library, stand unfinished, its pattern providing the interest.
The elliptical dome of the Rotunda is 135 by 85 feet, and weighs 140 tons. It was probably the largest Gustavino had constructed at that time, and much of the building world anticipated its collapse. Composed of an inner and outer shell with a hollow space between, each shell has nine layers of flat tiles layered end to end at the foundation, diminishing to only three tiles at the middle. The large skylight is inserted into the dome of the Rotunda.
Gustavino also developed the Catalonian specialty of stair vaulting after 1890. At the Custom House, the stairs are constructed using hard burned clay tiles and there are no metal supports. These individual stairs compose the grand and graceful staircases.
The decline of the skilled craftsman, and the rise of inexpensive steel made Gustavino’s work too costly, while the machine crafted aesthetic took over. These factors together made Gustavino’s astounding and efficient system a thing of the past.
