The Amazing Ideas and Inventions From The Earliest People: Building to Last

The Romans also used concrete to help them build domes. One of their most famous domed buildings is the Pantheon in Rome. This circular temple is roofed with a massive concrete dome over forty meters in diameter. One problem that the builders had to overcome was how to support such a big and heavy dome. They solved this by building the temple walls of solid concrete with an outer shell, or ‘facing’, of brick.

To help take strain of the roof, they added ‘buttresses’, or supports built against the walls to bear some of the weight. The dome on the Pantheon was made lighter by ‘coffering’ the ceiling. The dome is supported by thick concrete ribs arranged in a pattern of squares. The concrete in the center of the squares is thinner than on the ribs.

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The Romans used the Pantheon as a model for many circular buildings with domes. But they did not achieve the next step, which was to build a done on a square building. The first people to manage this were the Byzantines, a new civilization which rose up as the Roman Empire declined. Byzantium was the first Christian empire and the Byzantines built magnificent domed churches such as Hagia Sophia in the capital city of Constantinople.

BUILDINGS MADE IF LIGHT

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The Middle Ages was the period of Gothic architecture is the pointed arch. This was more elegant than the earlier, rounded Roman or Norman.

BRIDGES

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Building bridges was not easy before the development of the arch. A narrow stream could be bridged with a log nut a bridge across a wider gap had to be supported from below. Early bridges were built by supporting flat stone slabs on a row of stone pillars or piers set in the river bed. This only worked if the river was fairly narrow and shallow enough to build the piers. But once the Romans realized that arches could be used to build bridges, wider river could be spanned. The Roman built bridges with a series of semi- circular arches which cut down on the number of piers needed to support the bridge.

The Chinese were the first to use a shallow arch which could span a wide gap without going too high. The Great Stone Bridge over the River Chiao Shui in China (below) looks very modern even though it was built in AD 610. It has a shallow arch with a span of 37.5 metres. Many modern bridges bridges have a similar shallow arch.

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Arch and it also allowed the roof to be vaulted in different ways. The soaring, vaulted roofs of medieval cathedrals were built using stone ribs to support the ceiling above tall, pointed arches. The places where the ribs met on the ceiling were hidden by carvings called ‘bosses’.

The tall, graceful arches, large windows and high, delicate ceiling gave these buildings a light and airy appearance which had not been possible before. As stonemasons realized what bosses grew more and more elaborate and decorative.

Gothic stonemasons needed to find a way to support the weight of the heavy stone roofs of the cathedrals. They came up with ‘flying buttresses’, shaped like arches, but detached from the wall at ground level and curing in to meet it higher up.

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From the Egyptian pyramids to the European cathedrals, amazing stone building have been designed to last for eternity in celebration of gods and kings. All over the world, examples of the work to early builders still stand today as monuments to their great skill and an influence on architecture ever since.