Wooden roof framing.................    Illustrated Architecture Dictionary

Vault

 An arched structure of stone, brick, or reinforced concrete, forming a supporting structure of a ceiling or roof

Ribs and vaults are commonly found in Romanesque Revival and Gothic Revival styles.

Domes - A type of vault

For scores of years the Romanesque builders experimented in vaulting; the problem was not solved until the Normans hit upon the plan of covering the space with a framework of ribs and laying the stones in courses from rib to rib. The novelty of the method lay in the use made of the principal of balance as a means of ensuring stability, a principle which, incidentally, did away with the necessity for columns and piers of great size and strength. Gothic vaulting is nothing but an application of the principle of balance to the roof. The ribs of the vault, balanced the one against the other, and not the material between, are the real roof. What the Gothic builders did was to create a science of vaulting out of the idea of balance which the Romanesque masons had tested. - Ernest H. Short, History of Religious Architecture     (2002)

There are three major types of vaults: barrel, groin. and rib:

Barrel vault / Barrel roof A straight, continuous arched vault or ceiling, either semicircular or semi-elliptical in profile A barrel vault is a simple, concave cylindrical roof surface which looks like a barrel. A disadvantage is that the entire vault must be built at the same time, and later repairs are difficult to make because the entire barrel vault is affected. Illustration above: Blessed Trinity RC Church  Transverse arch above each aisle pier St. Francis Xavier RC Church Saints Peter & Paul RC Church Our Lady of Victory Basilica, Lackawanna St. Francis de Sales RC Church Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence, Italy St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City, Italy Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy

Groin(ed) vault / Cross vault A vault created where two barrel vaults meet at right angles Developed by the Romans. These vaults were easier to build than barrel vaults because small areas could be vaulted independently of one another. Arches are either round (Romanesque) or pointed (Gothic). When two barrel vaults intersect at a right angle, the juncture forms a groin or cross-vault, which provides lunette windows for lighting at either end. The stress load on a groin vault is to the four corners, or piers.  The groin vault is an intrinsically stronger design than the barrel vault because the barrel vault structure must rest on long walls creating less stable lateral stress, whereas the groin vault design can direct stresses almost purely vertically on the piers Web: Surface framed by the ribs of a ribbed vault

Rib(bed) vaults A section of the roof of a church made by building a skeleton of two or more ribs and later filling in the spaces between with stone and/or rubble. A vault supported by arched diagonal ribs. A ribbed vault is a ceiling crisscrossed by several projections which look like "ribs" in the human anatomy. Medieval European builders developed a modification, the rib vault, a skeleton of arches or ribs on which the masonry could be laid.   Ribbed vaults are commonly found in Romanesque and Gothic styles and their derivatives. The rib vault superseded the groin vault as the preferred solution for enclosing space in Gothic architecture. An advantage to using ribbed vaults is that little scaffolding is needed - the ribbed vault can be built be from above. Another advantage is that one section at a time can be built and later added to. Further, odd spaces can be easily include ribbing. Transverse arches: An arch of the vault that runs perpendicular to the nave that divides one bay from another Illustration above: Holy Angels RC Church Corpus Christi RC Church St. Ann's RC Church St. Joseph's RC Cathedral St. Joseph University RC Church Corpus Christi RC Church St. Ann's RC Church St. Mary of Sorrows / King Urban Life Center Hellenic Orthodox Church of the Annunciation St. Mark's RC Church St.-Denis Abbey, Paris, France St. Francis Xavier Church, Amsterdam, Holland Hotel de Villes (City Hall), Nyon, Switzerland Church of St. Mary (Kosciol Mariacki), Cracow, Poland

web site consulting by ingenious, inc.