When I enter an ancient building, such as the Agrippa’s Pantheon in Rome, and I observe it from inside, it strikes me that the person who made this building was much cleverer than I and knew more than I do.
When we speak of the future of architecture, I believe it is essential to look back through history for inspiration.
—John Ochsendorf
John Ochsendorf is Class of 1942 Professor of Architecture and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT. He received his master’s degree from Princeton University and a doctorate from Cambridge University. He studied masonry vaulting in Spain in 1999–2000 on a Fulbright Scholarship and again in 2007–2008. After becoming the first engineer to win the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, he spent a year studying vaulting in Italy. In 2008 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Ochsendorf conducts research on the mechanics and behavior of historical structures, especially masonry structures. His group is researching the dynamics of masonry buildings and the design of more sustainable infrastructure, drawing on examples ranging from the vaulted roofing of Gothic cathedrals to the hanging rope bridges of the Inca Empire. He is a world authority on structures and vaulting, combining his different knowledge in three fields of building construction: structural engineering, the historical evolution of architecture, and archaeology.
Ochsendorf founded the Guastavino Project at MIT, an initiative dedicated to documenting and preserving the tile vaulted works of the Guastavino Company, dating from the late nineteenth century and found in numerous buildings in the United States and across the world.1 He has also taken part in sustainable architecture projects, such as the collaboration with Michael Ramage to construct the unique Pines Calyx building, a pod-shaped (calyx) event center in Dover, UK, that includes two Guastavino-style vaults. In another project he collaborated on building the Mapungubwe National Park Interpretive Center in South Africa, which received an award at Barcelona’s 2008 World Architecture Festival.
Adolfo Plasencia:
John, thanks for receiving me here.
John Ochsendorf:
My pleasure! Welcome to MIT again.
A.P.:
John, you are a structural engineer who has also studied archaeology. You could, however, quite easily be an architect.
J.O.:
Although I teach in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, I haven’t actually studied architecture. I do, however, love the discipline and work a lot with architects.
A.P.:
In 2006, I published an essay on the emerging concepts of the MITUPV Exchange on the MIT OpenCourseWare site.2 One of the concepts I identified there crossed my mind again when I was in Mallorca some years later, at the unforgettable “Stonemasonry in Context: The Artifex Workshop,” with Miguel Ramis and Yung Ho Chang.3 We were discussing how many “wisdoms” from the past have been “unlearned” today. In my essay, the concept discussed was unlearning. Basically the essay was about technology, but at the workshop I was reminded of it again as it occurred to me that we have also forgotten marvelous things in architecture and construction that would be well worth recovering. What do you think?
J.O.:
Yes, absolutely. For example, if we think about an arch and a dome, they are traditional forms with four thousand years of development. With the Industrial Revolution and its new materials of steel and reinforced concrete, we have in effect abandoned a four-thousand-year-old technology, and this has been a tremendous shock.
Today, a person with a PhD in engineering from a prestigious university has less idea of how an arch functions than a mason of today, or of a hundred or a thousand years ago. To take another example, there was a colonial era bridge in Mexico that had been there for three centuries and had survived earthquakes, modern traffic, and wars without any problem. Then, twenty to thirty years ago, an engineer with a master’s degree in prestressed concrete bridges from MIT arrived, made some calculations, and said that this bridge, after three centuries, was no longer viable. He removed the bridge and made a new one of prestressed concrete because it was easier to calculate. My Mexican friends had the last laugh later on, saying that the original bridge had withstood wars, earthquakes, and modern traffic, but not the one built by a person with a master’s degree from MIT.
If we overlook history, or how an arch really works, there is a danger in the economic, cultural, and training senses. We as engineers do not study history. Yet one cannot imagine a writer or a composer who does not know his or her field inside out. It’s impossible. But in engineering, we know hardly anything about the history of our applied discipline, and it’s an impressive history. We don’t know the names or even the works of the great engineers of the past. I personally believe that if engineers and architects knew history, we could learn and understand many things, including both how to look after ancient buildings and how to construct new buildings.
A.P.:
John, you have spent a lot of time studying a building that is one of your favorites. The Pantheon in Rome was commissioned by Marcus Agrippa during the reign of Augustus and rebuilt by the emperor Hadrian. Could the Pantheon provide a lesson in the history that you are talking about? The building and its dome have been standing for two thousand years and continue to be used. Why do people who respect beauty, the past, or construction not learn a lesson from it? How is it possible that, as these examples exist, students at schools of architecture “unlearn” something like this?
J.O.:
If you study the history of a building like the Pantheon, its geometry and its symbolic elements, it turns out to be one of the most impressive buildings in the world. It has cracks within the dome, cracks of more or less 30 centimeters, quite large, that have been there more than two thousand years. They are not visible, but they are there. Even so, it remains perfectly stable. We do not, however, fully understand why it is so stable, nor do we fully know how safe it is. So one of the things we do here at MIT is to carry out tests and create new programs to better understand the structural safety of such ancient and impressive buildings. For example, if you consider the tools that we engineers have to make steel buildings, they don’t tell us anything; they don’t have the capacity to tell us enough about a building as old as the Pantheon. So what we have to do is rethink all of this and create new tools with software that takes the historical behavior of buildings into account.
A.P.:
Is it true there are cathedrals still standing that defy the programs of structural calculus in modern computers?
J.O.:
Yes, absolutely. We have no way of knowing at the moment just how stable they are. The Beauvais Cathedral in France, for example, or that of Palma de Mallorca are impressive buildings; they are mountains of stone laid in a stable form, but we do not really understand why they are so stable. The digital tools that we have don’t work on them. We are, however, working a lot with computer programmers, writing new software so as to better understand how those buildings function. These are very difficult problems because the geometry has changed.
For example, the top of the Pantheon has dropped almost a meter over the last two thousand years, and that has deformed the dome a lot. We have been working with tools such as 3D Scan Laser to discover its precise geometry. It’s a field of work that we are researching. Another field is the history of construction. I ask myself, How was it possible to build the Pantheon two thousand years ago? How was it possible to build a cathedral eight hundred years ago? The history of construction is wide open, and we think there are many ideas that can be taken from the past to create new things today.
A.P.:
That reminds me of the time I was on Easter Island with an archaeologist. He showed me three very important things. The first was a stone wall made from blocks that weighed several tons, with almost perfect joins. The second was that a civilization, completely cut off from the world, had developed that called itself “the umbilical cord of the world” (there is a place, Ahu Te Pito Kura, on the north coast of the island, with that name) because the people believed themselves to be the only inhabitants of the world. And the third thing he drew my attention to is an unanswered question: How did a lithic civilization that knew nothing about metal extract and hew sculptures of volcanic rock, some colossal, weighing almost eighty tons, and, from a quarry in a volcanic crater, move them fifteen miles over hilly land to their positions, and then stand them up? All the tests that have been undertaken to move similar grand structures have ended in failure. Perhaps it is because we have forgotten how these things were done twelve centuries ago.
Why do you think it is that that all this knowledge has been forgotten and that, as you said, a mason of ten centuries ago knew more than an engineer of today?
Why is accumulated knowledge not considered riches? Is it a question of fashion, of tools, or is it a cultural problem?
J.O.:
It’s probably a cultural problem. I believe, in engineering, we have a misguided ideology of progress. According to the ideology of progress, for example, a brick arch belongs to the past and a modern building must be of titanium or steel. So, on the one hand, our thought is focused only on those new materials, and on the other hand, we are on top, in the most recent layer of history, and we think that we, the engineers of today, with all our computers and tools, are superior to people of two thousand years ago, who knew a lot but were basically ignorant. However, when I enter an ancient building, such as the Agrippa’s Pantheon in Rome, and I observe it from inside, it strikes me that the person who made this building was much cleverer than I and knew more than I do.
A.P.:
He was cleverer and possessed the wisdom we have forgotten.
J.O.:
Exactly. I spent my PhD years at the University of Cambridge, England, studying domes and things like that. I began with the mathematicians’ problems of the nineteenth century in France, studying buttresses and similar structures, which presented real problems at that time. But in the twentieth century, with steel and concrete, we have abandoned that field. When we refer to World Heritage sites, we have to understand how these ancient buildings functioned. Furthermore, if we are talking about sustainability, about passive technology, for example, in a climate where the weather is almost always good, there is a body of accumulated knowledge in the vernacular or traditional architecture about how to do these things, and that knowledge base has been growing for centuries and centuries.
However, when we enter our glass boxes in Houston, London, or Valencia, we see that they have nothing to do with place, with the site where they have been built. Knowledge of the site makes sense. When we speak of the future of architecture, I believe it is essential to look back through history for inspiration.
A.P.:
Yung Ho Chang, an MIT professor, said at the Artifex workshop, “Stonemasonry in Context,” in Mallorca, that we have to recover the values of the craftsman because he considers architecture to be a craft.4 Do we have to put an end to the egos of architecture? Should we try to recover the humility that the stonemasons and the bricklayers had, those who knew both the materials and their trade?
J.O.:
It’s difficult to know why certain things happen with the training of architects today. In the United States, the architect is a god. The architects whose work I most like are those who work with people, who use their hands, who have technical ability in other fields, and who work as a team. Of course, a genius may appear at any given moment who can provide the total idea of a building, but I believe that making a building is not the job of a single person. One of the problems that we currently face is how to make buildings with lower carbon dioxide emissions. These difficult questions are beyond the ability of a single field to fully resolve. The only possibility for making buildings that people need nowadays is for there to be an ongoing dialogue among engineers, architects, biologists, information technology experts, historians, archaeologists. … It’s clear to me that we have a tremendous problem to overcome.
A.P.:
Let’s talk about a building that you and your team built with three conditions: it had to be built to last five hundred years, have zero energy consumption, and use construction techniques that took advantage of local and, if possible, craft materials. Tell me about this building that you were involved in and that, moreover, holds the record for sustainability.
J.O.:
It’s a building in England that we made several years ago. It’s called the Pines Calyx building. You’ll enjoy this story because you’re from Valencia, and it has something to do with Valencia. We used the timbrel vault, which is a type of vault whose origins go back to fourteenth-century Valencia (the oldest documented example of this type of dome is found there, in the Capilla de los Jofre, in the Convento de Santo Domingo of 1382).5 Later it was used in New Granada, Colombia, in the eighteenth century, and in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We faced a difficult problem: how to make a building with the materials available there? In the end, we made earthen walls, which are similar to concrete but with a much lower energy consumption, and we used hand-made clay bricks that were left over from a mine in England. This was an element true to the type of economic development of that same place. We contracted some Spanish masons from Extremadura to help us with the vaults and built two not very large vaults with a span of 13 meters. By doing so, we were able to considerably reduce their “embodied energy,” that is, their level of carbon dioxide emissions emitted during construction. We reduced those emissions by 80 percent compared with the lowest levels of carbon dioxide emissions in building construction using local materials at that time in England.
It’s obvious that if we don’t have to go to China, Mongolia, Japan, or other distant sources to find materials, that has its advantages; it is much cheaper than other types of construction. Moreover, the money goes to the local people who build the building. This is sensible. In some way, this strategy might appear to be antiglobalization, but I don’t think it is. It is trying to look for solutions that make sense in the area where one is going to build.
A.P.:
Who worked with you on this project?
J.O.:
An English architect and several English engineers, and a group of MIT students. We went there for two weeks, and a person from New Zealand did the vaulting. It was an experiment, but a very entertaining project that eventually won many awards as a sustainable, low-energy building. And thanks to that building of several years ago, we now have many more projects.
A.P.:
As you said, it may be seen as an antiglobalization building. Perhaps the great steel manufacturing and building systems industry have more power than the university schools of architecture and engineering that believe in sustainability? Do you think that the great global industries, for economic reasons, have imposed their power?
J.O.:
That’s an interesting question. I hadn’t given that much thought, but yes, I reckon so. For example, for people like us, as structural engineers, civil engineers, and also as architects, there would seem to be only two materials in the world, steel and reinforced concrete. Obviously, that is not the case. If someone invented wood tomorrow at MIT, it would be seen as the most amazing element in the history of the world. It’s something that comes from trees, which consume carbon dioxide, that has all the desired properties of rigidity—wood is an incredible material, and so too is brick. They are simple materials that have been known for a long time and are materials on a human scale with huge possibilities. However, today we do not talk about those materials. That is partly due to our “ideology of progress,” which doesn’t allow us to think much about wood.
A.P.:
Let’s turn now to a Valencia connection you have, the father-and-son duo with the surname Guastavino. They also had and expressed an “accumulated knowledge” that, unfortunately, we Valencians have almost forgotten. Tell us about your love for the work of these two Valencians.
J.O.:
The family Guastavino came from Valencia. The father, Rafael Guastavino Moreno, was born in 1842. He built several buildings in Catalonia, but at the age of forty-one he emigrated to the United States with his son, Rafael Guastavino Espósito. By the 1950s he and subsequently his son had built more than a thousand buildings in forty-one states, including more than two hundred in Manhattan and the most important buildings in the history of the United States. For example, Carnegie Hall has Guastavino vaulting. They built vaults just like the traditional ones of Valencia (here I have one of their bricks, which in the Valencia language is called a rajola; it has the brand name of the company that made it imprinted in relief with a picture of its two-layered brick vaults). Valencia provides the first documented example of this type of vault, built in 1382. And even as they worked with this traditional technology they continually sought to innovate, to make greater spans, new forms, using new materials; introducing, for example, Portland cement. They held twenty-six patents in the United States as they sought to make changes for the better, always innovative changes, such as in acoustics.
One of their important buildings is on Ellis Island, where all immigrants used to arrive in the United States, as my grandmother did, who came from Italy eighty years ago. Five capitol buildings in different states were built by Guastavino, and numerous universities, such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, and the University of Chicago, have buildings by Guastavino. The main library at Harvard also has Guastavino vaulting, the original idea for which comes from Valencia. The Boston Public Library, one of the oldest and most important libraries in the United States, was vaulted by Rafael Guastavino. However, their history is not widely known here either: their buildings include churches, banks, and thousands of other such important constructions in the history of United States, but as architects, engineers, and builders, they have unfortunately been forgotten.
A.P.:
Moreover, these buildings were made at a time when it was difficult to move around the territory, in an age without planes, with very slow trains. The United States is very big, and we never truly appreciate the difficulties that people had to overcome.
J.O.:
Exactly. And they, one hundred years ago, had twenty offices in ten U.S. cities! A hundred years ago, at some point, they were making one hundred buildings at the same time, including very large train stations in Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit, and Boston. All the great U.S. cities built train stations using this incredible vaulting made by these Valencians. Today we are losing some of these old stations, such as Pennsylvania Station, which opened in 1909 with timbrel vaults built by the Guastavino Company. It is such a long and important history, and so little is known about it. I have been working for ten years with colleagues in Spain, architects and engineers who are interested in their history too, because they are also little known in Spain. I also wrote a book, Guastavino Vaulting: The Art of Structural Tile, which was published by Princeton Architectural Press. And I have a bet with my students at the MIT that if they find a Guastavino building or a vault that I don’t know of, I’ll invite them for a meal. We have found eighty buildings here in Boston—just a part of the important work they did. Almost every week we are finding new buildings because we still do not know many of their works. So it’s an American, Valencian, and architectural story that is very important to world history but is still little known.
A.P.:
We’ll try, through this conversation, to raise awareness of that Valencian and American story. Young people always want to be modern, and those at MIT even more so! How do you explain to students what the alchemy is between the knowledge of the past and the vision of the future, so as to continue to make progress without forgetting the best of previous generations?
J.O.:
That’s a fascinating question, and it’s true that students arriving at MIT to study engineering, for example with me, never imagine that I am going to work on stone vaulting. They never thought, prior to arriving at MIT, of building gothic vaults. However, with the training we have at present, it is almost impossible to make a vault like that today.
A.P.:
But people believe that is for economic reasons, but it isn’t, is it?
J.O.:
No, absolutely not! It’s because architects lack the knowledge of how to build them.
A.P.:
Miquel Ramis says he can prove that a stone arch can be cheaper than one made of steel or concrete.
J.O.:
Of course! And if we are talking about one or two hundred years ago, even more so, because they last much longer. For instance, the life of a reinforced concrete bridge or one of steel is fifty years, but a stone arch can last two thousand years!
A.P.:
And as to the alchemy of innovation and the wisdom of the past: how do you combine them?
J.O.:
It’s difficult to explain, but the most important thing is to pose interesting problems. How does a Gothic vault behave in an earthquake, for example? It’s a fascinating problem, and students are delighted with such questions. So if we pose really good questions, the alchemy begins to appear. Again, with the topic of sustainability, how do we make a building with low carbon dioxide emissions? That is a very difficult question.
A.P.:
Yes, because constructing a building throws waste into the atmosphere and worsens climate change. People are not aware of the energy required to make a building and the subsequent effects on climate, is that not so?
J.O.:
Yes. For example, here in the United States, buildings consume more electricity and energy than transport vehicles (cars, planes, trains, buses, motor boats). Of course, we are using buildings all the time but, in many cases, they are inefficient in terms of energy saving. There are, however, many ways of reducing their energy demands. We are moving in that direction, but it is not easy.
A.P.:
Are architects afraid of not being modern, perhaps?
J.O.:
Yes, and an interesting thing is today’s problem, that architects want buildings with new shapes, with the “Guggenheim effect” of Bilbao. So for us the question is how to make a building with less material that consumes less energy and that also has an interesting shape.
As an example, the building we made in South Africa won an award for the best building in the world in 2009. It was made using vaulting.
The building is the Mapungubwe Museum, in South Africa, and is a World Heritage site. It has fifteen vaults made with African mud by local people and built by the same New Zealander who did the vaults in England, and it’s considered a revolutionary building! Not long after we presented it as an idea for this way of thinking to the president of the World Bank. We said that instead of sending materials from China, such as cement or concrete, we look for materials and talent locally so as to make new things and build vaults with local materials in a passive building that does not use much electricity. That was a good idea. And little by little these buildings are gaining ground in architecture, but the problem remains of how to make buildings with a lower carbon footprint, but in an interesting and beautiful shape.
A.P.:
Thanks very much, John.
J.O.:
Thanks to you. It’s my pleasure.