A small setting-out task

[Eric The Viking]

We had a week-end break in Seville a week or so ago.

Time doesn't permit, but it is a beautiful city, full of palaces, gothic churches, narrow, winding streets, and in our experience very nice people. I found this below in the Alcazar palace (someone left it there...), and it's doin' me 'ead in, with its sheer complexity.

It's the ceiling of the Hall of Ambassadors, a roughly cube shaped room about 35ft sides and height, and in the ceiling is this amazing hemispherical dome (from 1427). It's wood, covered in gold leaf:

Yes, I know you would probably build a form inside the dome and so on, but it's carved beautifully too. The detailed symmetry is staggering.

The place was heaving with tourists, and although I did manage to get to the exact centre of the room (as close as possible), sadly I didn't notice the flare until I got back (someone else's camera flash or LED, I think). So nil points for snapping.

How on earth did they do it that perfectly? It looks like nothing has warped or moved out of place, and to the naked eye it glows...

 

[AndyT]

Aliens in spacecraft. Definitely. Nothing else makes sense.

Nice pic btw. I didn't notice the flare either.

 

[AndyT]

Eric, this stunning building deserves more than a glib reply. I too am awestruck by the level of daring and skill which was developed so long ago. I have often looked for 'general reader' type books on how ancient buildings were erected but I have found very little - a few books translated from the French and a couple of books (which I recommend) by American author John Fitchen*.

But this Spanish/Arabic work is in a different tradition to the more familiar Gothic or Baroque buildings we have here.

A bit of quick searching did throw up some academic articles which, though aimed at specialists, give a bit of an introduction to what the timber arches are doing here and how using them in parallel pairs allows for making a wonderful pattern with the spaces left in between.

This one is worth a look, I think, from the 6th International Conference on Arch Bridges, held in Fuzhou, China in 2010:

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11993819.pdf

* Building Construction Before Mechanization http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/842205101 and
The Construction of Gothic Cathedrals http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/174827781

 

[sammy.se]

This is stunning - thanks for sharing.
I really love this style of Arabic/Islamic/Moorish geometric designs, and the architecture - and when it's executed on a level like this, is amazing.
I'm glad it's preserved and available for people to enjoy and be inspired from.