Vault Lights Make a Historic Statement
Before they had a way to bring artificial light to ships,The Sidewalk Vault Light Renaissance Articles shipbuilders of the 19th century developed the ingenious idea to incorporate glass into the flooring of the vessels as a way to provide light to dark spaces below deck. These vault lights, as they would become known, were invented by the American inventor and builder Thaddeus Hyatt. The vault lights were a valuable innovation because they reduced the need for torches, lanterns, and other open-flame lighting that sometimes caused catastrophic fires on old wooden ships.
Thaddeus’s brilliant innovation was soon adopted by cities and developers who incorporated vault lights into sidewalks and other surfaces as a way to bring daylight to below-ground spaces such as apartments, basements, storage spaces, and other subterranean rooms. In the United States, from 1860 until the widespread use of electricity in the 1930s, vault lights brought daylight to dark spaces.
The first vault lighting featured glass shaped like prisms to maximize the spread of light into the room below. To further maximize the light below ground, subsequent sidewalk vault lights incorporate several rows of prisms in cast-iron panels or concrete.
rib vault, also called ribbed vault, in building construction, a skeleton of arches or ribs on which masonry can be laid to form a ceiling or roof. Rib vaults were frequently used in medieval buildings, most famously in Gothic cathedrals. Similarly to groin vaults, rib vaults are constructed from two, sometimes three, intersecting vaults, which can be of different widths but must be of the same height. The medieval mason used pointed arches—probably adopted from Islamic architecture in Spain. Unlike the round arches used in Romanesque cathedrals, pointed arches could be raised as high over a short span as over a long one. The arches are located at the joints of the vaults and carry the weight of the ceiling.
four common types of vault
Vault Lights Find Dual Uses
The demand for sustainable light sources and the beauty of new glass products on the market have led to a resurgence in the use of vault lights.
As many designers and architects know, advances in materials and the design of new products have improved the durability of vault lights Many feature a larger surface area for increased light penetration. Those 19th-century sidewalk prisms have been reimagined as circular bullet glass and square vault lights.
In daylight hours, they allow natural light to shine into indoor spaces. Lit from within at night, the glass pieces create a dramatic and warm architectural statement.
The rib vault arose out of medieval masons’ efforts to solve the challenges associated with supporting heavy masonry ceiling vaults over wide spans. The problem was that the heavy stonework of the traditional arched barrel vault and the groin vault exerted a tremendous downward and outward pressure that tended to push the walls upon which the vault rested outward, thus collapsing them. A building’s vertical supporting walls thus had to be made extremely thick and heavy in order to contain the barrel vault’s outward thrust. Consequently, windows were few and small in Romanesque churches, and interiors were dark and heavy. Medieval masons solved the problem about 1120 with a number of brilliant innovations—first and foremost, the rib vault. The arching and intersecting stone ribs support a vaulted ceiling surface that is composed of mere thin stone panels. This greatly reduced the weight (and thus the outward thrust) of the ceiling vault, and, since the vault’s weight was now carried at discrete points (the ribs) rather than along a continuous wall edge, separate widely spaced vertical piers to support the ribs could replace the continuous thick walls. The round arches of the barrel vault were replaced by pointed (Gothic) arches, which distributed thrust in more directions downward from the topmost point of the arch.
Decades of experimentation produced vaulting that was light, strong, open, versatile, and applicable everywhere. Combined with such other innovations as flying buttresses, rib vaults allowed Gothic buildings to become, in succession, broader and taller. How their visual appearance changed is easy to see if one compares, for instance, the tall and airy 13th-century Reims Cathedral in France with the stout 11th-century Durham Cathedral in England.
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