DANIEL LIBESKIND
You have to enter a realm when you become naïve - where you don't know how to do something.

That's exactly what Brunelleschi did. He didn't enter a transparent space in which constructions of that sort were already made. He entered as I do. I think all creative architects, artists, enter a space of forgetting, of er, unlearning.

CHAT - BALMOND & LIBESKIND
And then it rises all through here, this entire space here is actually traversed by the building without any support. Now that will give some sleepless nights. If you think that it's actually - the point is just over this... this ridge, into the void...into the void, up from here, spiralling off into the void.

DANIEL LIBESKIND
When I came to see the dome I had studied it in books, I had looked at pictures of the dome. I had looked at drawings of the dome, and I was interested in how it was made as a young architect - a student of architecture. But nothing was there to prepare me for the actual presence of the dome.

It is the shock of the new in some senses. It is the shock of something that has never existed and that no drawing and no device could actually prepare us for its existence. I think that's the shock which it had then and it still has for us today.

SIMON PEPPER
I think one has to take a leap back into time and put yourself in the position of people who didn't really know what the end of the story was going to be. This was a very similar experience to a lot of medieval builders when they were pushing the limits of gothic construction.

NARRATOR
The massive vaults of Florence Cathedral had pushed the tried and tested methods of the middle ages to the limit. Each vault had been built using wooden templates called centring elements which supported the stone work during construction and also guided the overall shape of the arches. But the vast dome needed a creative step - a leap of the imagination that the fifteenth century masons found impossible to take.

TIMOTHY VERDON
Their notion that they could do the same thing for the dome, derived from the belief that they could in fact construct the same kind of wooden centring, shoring it up from below, scaffolding from sixty metres below, scaffolding forty three metres wide, a forest of scaffolding supporting a mountain of centring elements, on which then hundreds and thousands of tons of brick and stone masonry would have to be laid. When they actually faced the real problems they would have to solve, they understood instinctively that the same system would not work.

NARRATOR
But Brunelleschi was convinced he could do it - that somehow the massive, curving walls could be made to rise without any support.

TIMOTHY VERDON
Brunelleschi had a kind of remarkable confidence. He says at one point for the er commissioners of the cathedral, that even as he begins the work he knows he doesn't know everything he'll need to know to build it, he has certain ideas but he'll have to work the others out as he goes. He is confident, though - he says that since the church is dedicated to God and His Holy Mother, they will help him.

NARRATOR
Brunelleschi began to build, not knowing whether his ideas would work or not. It was the gamble of his life - and he knew it. Brunelleschi had to be single-minded. To have any chance of success he needed to invent new tools, new measurement systems, and radical working practices. Here was a man at odds with his workforce, telling experienced bricklayers how to mix their mortar, showing master masons how to cut their stone.

Still unwilling or unable to explain his plans, Brunelleschi remained passionately focussed. He knew that he had to do one thing - keep his newly built walls from falling down.

TIMOTHY VERDON
We know that at a certain point, when the walls of his dome began to curve inward, when therefore the workmen's confidence that the normal structural stability was undermined by the curve toward the centre, they refused to go out on the scaffolding, they felt it was certain to fall. Brunelleschi himself had to go out on the scaffolding, pull great weights behind him, walk up and down, jump to show them, that the walls would in fact stay in place.

NARRATOR
So just what did Brunelleschi do? In the stairwell of the dome one piece of evidence remains visible. The bricks are laid in an unusual pattern.

  < previous   next > Page 4 of 6

Content last updated: 29/03/2005

Comments