Guastavino Vaulting - From Barcelona to black mountain part 1

[intro music] >> Peter Austin I'm Peter Austin... I'm Peter Austin... I'm Peter Austin. I'm still Peter Austin. Okay, and I'm from Asheville originally, but I don't live here now. And I got interested in Raphael Guastavino because my great-grandfather was a stone mason, and he worked on St. Lawrence, as well as the Biltmore House, and all of the big stone buildings in Asheville. And was drawn to it and got interested in Guastavino about thirty years ago. Now it's standard procedure for someone standing where I am standing to say "We are very fortunate tonight to have as our speaker..." And we are. That's all true. But there's more fortunateness going around tonight than is usual. First of all, the most fortunate person can't be with us tonight because he died over a century ago, and that's Raphael Guastavino. He is fortunate that you are interested in coming out on - this is Wednesday - a Wednesday night to hear about his life a century after he died. He is fortunate in having John Ochsendorf take on the work of telling his career, which many aspects of it had gone untold before. He would be - when people start talking for the dead and they didn't actually know the dead, I usually look askance at that. When someone says, if "Thomas Jefferson were here, he would say... " I usually tune that out. But I am sure Raphael Guastavino would approve of you being here tonight and of John taking on his work. Mr. Guastavino was a very complex man, but he was also very ambitious, extremely hard-working, and intelligent, and persistent, and he is fortunate in having you here tonight and John too... having done the work on it. Guastavino was born in Valencia in 1841. He had early on a very successful building career in Barcelona, and he worked to improve and develop, further develop, a way of building horizontal surfaces using tile. Now most of us, when we think of tile, we think of tile in the bathroom, tile around the edge of the stove in the kitchen. We don't think of building a roof, a ceiling, a stair, a floor, with tile, but that is what they were doing in Spain, and Guastavino improved it. He introduced modern cements to the system, and he made bigger spans, and had an extremely successful career there. But then, he apparently wanted to live the immigrant dream, and he came to the United States in the early eighties when he was in his early forties and he introduced, he tried to introduce here, he did introduce here, this way of building that was wholly novel to Americans. He would talk to people about it, architects, so forth, and they literally didn't know what he was talking about. But, fortunately, he had photographs, and he could say, "I built this, - I can work it in - showing a textile mill as big as Beacon Blankets in Swanannoa, that may have helped build this building. So they had to listen to him a little bit, and he became successful here. He died in 1908, having moved to Asheville, and the company continued on for several other decades, but no one else in the country was building that way. And it was a novel way of building, and as the business declined, the knowledge was lost. He died in 1908; the business closed in the early 1960's, and by that time, really, hardly anyone knew how you put this together. Fortunately, George Collins of Colombia was on the scene. He had just learned about Guastavino, and he persuaded the company, Raphael Guastavino Construction, to give all the papers to him, and he took them back to Colombia. Six filing cabinets this high, and that doesn't include the drawings, and he put those in his office, and he started going through them. He built - he wrote a paper in 1968 that is still the definitive article on Guastavino, and he laid the beginning of the foundation. Janet Parks - however, he did not write the book... He said he was going to write the book, he worked on the book, but he wasn't given time to write the book. The papers were still there though. Janet Parks of Avery Library, Columbia University, got an NEH grant in the mid 1990s to put those papers in order. Now there was a foundation for John Ochsendorf to come and begin to tell the story himself. Now John is also fortunate to have Guastavino as a topic. Guastavino blends a lot of various architecture, engineering, ceramics, acoustics, the history of Spain, economics, Hispanic culture, as well as, since it's thought that this system may have come from Persia and was brought by the Muslims when they invaded Spain, you even have Islamic culture introduced in this. And John is a person who blends disciplines. He's not content with being a professor at MIT of engineering. He is interested in a humanist approach also. He is fortunate, as R.G. is, in having you here as an audience tonight, because no crowd - I can't think of any crowd anywhere who is more interested in Raphael Guastavino. Asheville has St. Lawrence. Buncombe County has the grounds of his estate, just south of Black Mountain, there is the Biltmore house. Also, Guastavino, is buried in St. Lawrence, so if nothing else, we have a body. As well as living the immigrant dream, he lived the Asheville dream. I don't think he planned to live here. He came here to work on the Biltmore house. How many of you were driving through on 40, or on the Parkway, or came to visit a friend, or visit on a weekend and went "I want to live here"? That's what Guastavino did. He came and worked on the Biltmore House, then he went out to Black Mountain and started buying up land. He had the immigrant dream - I'm having trouble with that tonight - and the Ashevillian dream also. But finally, you and R.G. - that's what I call him now - you and Guastavino are fortunate in having John Ochsendorf to tell the story. First, he is highly credentialed, with degrees from Cornell, Princeton, and Cambridge, with a doctorate from Cambridge in engineering. He also had and archaeology degree, though, in his undergraduate degree at Cornell it was a dual degree. He, even then, was broadening and not content with just science and just engineering. I'm afraid his resume is littered with awards. At Cambridge, he won the National Final Award for a paper he wrote on grass bridges in Peru. And some people probably looked at that and went "Hm, how are you going to get a job with that?" He then had a Fullbright. He had a Rome Prize. He's the first engineer in a century of Rome Prizes to receive that award. And then the MacArthur Award. I won't say finally, because I don't think he's done yet - and he as I said is a professor of engineering at MIT, and he also is a practicing engineer. This interest he has in blending the humanities with the sciences is what has allowed him to be the one to tell the story of Raphael Guastavino. In the 1950s, a man named C.P. Snow wrote a famous lecture - gave a famous lecture and then wrote a famous book called The Two Cultures, talking about how in much of western society, there was an increasing division between the training of those people who were scientists and those who were in the humanities, and consequently, they had a hard time talking to one another. John has bridged this gap. He is certainly living in the two cultures and using science at MIT to teach scientific principles to non-scientific majors. At MIT a few years ago, he had his students build one of those Peruvian grass suspension bridges. They sat in the hallways and wound the grasses together and actually made a bridge that would hold up people. Now the MacArthur Award is called the "genius award" - and you could bat that back and forth - but when I look at who receives it, what I think mostly you see are people who found what they really wanted to do, and they ignored anybody who told them they shouldn't do it, that maybe you couldn't get a job making grass suspension bridges, like they did 600 years ago in Peru; they pursued their own dream, and they were successful. And if that's genius, well then, so be it. So, we are very fortunate tonight, all of us, in having as our speaker the man who won all those awards and has all those credentials, but also, a guy who's a nice guy, John Ochsendorf. [applause] >> John Ochsendorf Thank you. Thank you very much, Peter. That was frankly too much, but very kind. That was very very kind. I should start by saying that there are people in the room who know many things about Guastavino that I will never know. Peter Austin has probably forgotten more about Guastavino than I will ever know, and has taught me a huge amount, so I'm really grateful to him. And I'm grateful to all of you for being here. This is a phenomenal turn-out. I want to especially thank Cindy for inviting me and for doing all the work to make it possible. It's really a privilige. I grew up a few hours north of here in West Virginia, and so it's nice to be back in a place with hills, and I have a great fondness for North Carolina generally. And although both Chapel Hill and the campus at Duke have Guastavino vaulting on them, I lean a little more to the Chapel Hill side. And anyway, it's great to be back in Asheville. I absolutely love it here. So, what I'd like to do is tell you some of the story of Guastavino, how it relates to Asheville, and give you some details from our research, and I've been asked to speak for only three and a half hours, so I'm going to try to cram it in. Many of you, of course, know examples of Guastavino vaulting, like here in the Winter Garden at Biltmore, Ellis Island, the registry hall where millions of immigrants arrived, including my grandmother from Italy, the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, which celebrates its hundredth - its centennial - this year and is an absolutely magnificent space and one of the greatest spaces in Manhattan. Carnegie Hall - the lobby of Carnegie Hall is a Guastavino vault. The tiles are covered by plaster so we don't see them, but these are major landmarks across the country, and yet in many ways, this is an Asheville story. And you find these domes across the country. You find large-scale works from universities, museums, government buildings, the Supreme Court - an incredible array of important projects all across the country, and what they achieved in a short period of time is just astonishing. And just one statistic that I like: in 1910, the Guastavino company was building 100 major buildings at a time. In the same - at the same time, they were building train stations in almost every major city in the country. They were building a museum for the Smithsonian - a hundred buildings at once. They had offices in twelve cities across the country. So this was a major, major industry. I want to start just by introducing what is this vaulting technology that they built and used, and I show it here in a drawing from a Spanish architect Luis Moya. The tile vaulting on the bottom is a laminated tile vault that is made of thin tiles set flat, bonded on their thin edge, and the stone vault that you see at the top, a stone arch, needs to be supported during construction with formwork, with wooden centering. Only when the keystone is in place does the vault stand. The magic of a Guastavino vault is they could build their vaults with no support from underneath, and that made it highly economical, it made it very fast in construction, and it made it efficient in terms of material use. It was thinner, it had less horizontal thrust on the supports. So this was an incredible technology. Did Guastavino invent it? No, the technology exists today in Spain, and this is what the construction process looks like, taking a thin clay brick called a tabique in Spain, using a fast-setting mortar, a plaster of Paris, on two edges, tapping it into place. It stays, and the fast-setting bond on two edges is enough to hold it up. And in this way, you can build out toward the center with no support underneath. So the crossing guides that you see in the middle are there as geometrical guides. And this was a vault, the first vault I was lucky enough to build during a year in Spain and in a workshop in the western part of Spain where they continue to train masons to build these vaults today. But the art has basically been lost, and small groups of people around the world are still building it. So this was the technology that allowed them to build long spans, lightweight, quickly, to a variety of different geometries. These vaults have high load-capacity. This is an MIT ton, a vault built by a former student. This is a vault that is a half an inch thick and was built in about a day and a half, and this was the first vault built at MIT in over a century after Guastavino had lectured at MIT in the 1890s. So, what are the advantages? Minimal support during construction, it's fireproof, you can adapt it to different geometries, much lighter weight than conventional stone or brick vaults. A common misconception, and one that Guastavino, Sr., had some confusion about is that they don't thrust on their supports. These vaults do push on their supports just a bit less than other vaults because they're thinner and they weigh less, but here you see a historical photo where a mason in Spain is building a barrel vault out from a wall with no support and just using his eye to set the tiles. So where does this come from? The oldest existing vault that we know of is a staircase in a Moorish house from the twelfth century outside of what is today Valencia, Spain. So it's pretty clear it was introduced into the Iberian Peninsula by Moorish architects. The oldest vault that's still standing is in a chapel from the 1300s in Valencia that we know of. These vaults came to great popularity in the 1300s for their lightweight low cost and they spread like wildfire throughout Valencia, Barcelona, up into Spain, eventually Italy. We do not know the extent of this construction technology. A long-standing question I'm still working on is the exact technology of the vault of the Cistine Chapel could well-be this tile vaulted system. The understanding of the history of where this construction technology spread, we're really just in our infancy. It's known in many places around the world as Catalon vaulting - Catalons are very good at promoting Catalonia, as they should be. It's a wonderful place. In Rome, they call it a vaulta romana, they call it a Roman vault. Guastavino never called it Catalon vaulting. That came about in 1904 after he had already left Spain. Guastavino, I will differentiate, I will talk mostly about the father and the son. So this is the father studying in school in 1862 in Barcelona. He studied in a marvelous, marvelous school called the School of Master Builders. And this was between an architect engineer. Many of his professors at the time went on to found the school of architecture in Barcelona and to teach Goudi, Antonio Goudi, the great Catalon architect, whom many of you know, I'm sure. Goudi visited the works of Guastavino as a student. So Guastavino was a generation younger than Goudi, was highly accomplished in Barcelona. At twenty-five, he got to do a factory that filled four city blocks in Barcelona. It still stands today. Twenty-five year-olds don't have this kind of opportunity today, unfortunately, and it's a much-beloved landmark, with its remarkable octagonal chimney, a great work of structural brick, and huge expanses. Guastavino was using tile vaulting as a fairly standard construction system in Catalonia. Many of the textile mills' factories in the 1840s were built with this system, but for me this is his first great masterpiece. This is a public theater about ten miles north of Barcelona, in a lovely little village called Vilassar de Dalt. And this theater was finished in 1880, and it really demonstrated the ability Guastavino showed to create large, public spaces out of his tile vaulting system. This is a shallow vault, built in concentric rings, with an oculus, and the town of Vilassar loves this vault so much, they have established a bi-annual Guastavino prize for original research on Guastavino. It's waiting to be won by a researcher here in Asheville who uncovers new things and submits it for the prize. The prize includes not only a hefty cash award, but also a trip to Barcelona, which is well worth taking. I hope some of you will be inspired to do more research on Guastavino. There's much more to be done, and to go for this prize. Why did he come to New York? He was forty years old. He was successful, he was building dozens of major projects in Barcelona in the 1860s-1870s. Certainly, there were professional opportunities here, better access to Portland cement. He wanted to build on a large scale. He had received a prize in the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. There were also personal reasons. He had marital problems of his own doing, very clearly. He came to the United States with his youngest son, and his wife and other three children went to Argentina, and he brought the babysitter with him, so you can draw your own conclusions about that. And so, he had problems, certainly, in that department, and there were other things that we may never know about, but he also came to the U.S. at a time of great opportunity. In 1871 in Chicago, 19,000 buildings burned in one fire. Six square miles of the city. Cities were built with a lot of wooden buildings, without a strict fire code, and you can imagine the opportunities in fireproof construction were really ripe. So he hitched onto that. He arrived. He tried to work as an architect, and it's fascinating now to think about how a middle-aged architect from Spain - there were very few immigrants from Spain to the United States; many of them from Spain would of course go to Cuba or South America or some place where naturally Spanish was spoken. Guastavino knew no English. He didn't have any connections that would have linked him to big architects, so he tried to work, he got little bits of work. This is his oldest known project from 1886 that's still existing in the U.S. There may be older ones we still haven't found. He tried to work as an architect, but a curious thing happened. He would submit a design for a building to a design competition, and he would lose the competition. They would give it to another architect, but the client would say, "I want your design, but I want to use this gentleman's tile vaults, because they clearly are fireproof. This happened several times, and it happened at the Boston Public Library. He submitted a design for the Boston Public Library we've never found. He had no hope of winning it because he had no connections, but he got his foot in the door to help build the Boston Public Library, and that allowed him to start a company that he called the Guastavino Fireproof Construction Company. He basically gave up on a career as an architect, even though he was passionate about design, he was an accomplished designer, and here he is in a top-hat. He was blessed with really remarkable facial hair, the kind I could only aspire to. But he also was on site. He was a builder. Here we see the form work on the left for the individual arches, but then these vaults could be filled in with no support from underneath. McKim, Mead and White, the architects for the job, very late in the process, allowed him to replace his vaults. In fact, he was such a showman, he arrived on site and said, "I'll build my vaults for free if you'll just give me the iron beams that are already on site for the building. So there was material on site for another system and they redid the drawings, and Guastavino reworked and was responsible for much of the design. McKim forced him to do a load test. Here we see those vaults filled in. We have a marvelous photographic record of the construction of this building. McKim forced him to do a load test. He loaded these vaults with 600 pounds per square foot to prove that they could support the weight of the books, and these beautiful vaults are still found throughout the Boston Public Library, major landmark of American architecture, seven different types of vaulting in this building. In the 1980s, the library hosted a day-long symposium celebrating Barcelona cultural influences in Boston called "From Barcelona to Boston." They talked about music and poetry and gastronomy. They have the symposium under tile vaults from Barcelona, and they never mentioned it. The extent to which the story is largely unknown, and again I'd like to acknowledge that Peter Austin has been working on Guastavino and has done really ground-breaking research on it from before I even got involved in it, and there's still so much for us to learn, and it's still not a name that's well known, maybe in the streets of Asheville, judging by tonight's turnout, but not across the country. Now this project, the Boston Public Library, was hugely important because during the project, Guastavino and McKim decided to expose the tile in the ceiling. Every project before that, Guastavino's vaults were covered with plaster and that beautiful theater I showed you in Vilassar de Dalt, that had the exposed bricks, that was a renovation done ten years ago. They stripped off the plaster, because we think of Guastavino as exposed brick, but it was originally plastered and painted. Now, McKim thought this is a way that we can express it, and Guastavino came up with different patterns, at different prices, and throughout the whole building, you see different exposed tile. That became their trademark in all of the projects across the country. It became common for them to expose the tile and to really demonstrate the honesty of construction of these bricks in the ceiling that are decorative but also load-bearing, and also tell the story of the construction. You look at a vault like this and you can see the ribs that would have been built first and you can read the construction history in it as well. Guastavino, I argue in the book, was really the author of these designs. Architect after architect on their drawings would write, and this came later once they were more established, "Guastavino here." Then you'd get these beautiful drawings back that not only developed the geometry but the patterns and really designed the whole spaces. I argue that the firm deserves credit for not only the conception of them but also the visual impact of these spaces, and that these tile-vaulted ceilings are not only works of art in their own right, but are gradually becoming recognized as that across the country. McKim writes a letter in 1892 expressing the entire confidence in the system. Here in 1891, they've taken out an ad with a long list of buildings under construction. So the company arrives in the spring of '89, and within two years, they're building major projects in New York, up and down the east coast, Madison Square Garden. An early church, in Providence, Rhode Island, the central congregational church by Karere and Hastings, the architects of the New York Public Library, young architects, they worked up a design that looked like this. Guastavino, a distinguished senior architect, many years senior to them, said "No, that's not really what you want. What you want is more of a Spanish-looking church." So Guastavino reworked the design and for me, this building has a lot of affinity with the Basilica of St. Lawrence, in terms of the expression, and I'm certain that this project had an influence on the Basilica of St. Lawrence. And that is a marvelous paper waiting to be written by a student or John Toms. Look into this topic. There are many fascinating things, and even though Guastavino was not the architect on this project, I think he had a heavy hand in its design, and here on the inside, for the first time in the United States, we see a tile-vaulted dome, a large open space, this is 1892, where not only are you expressing the tile, but also it's defining the whole interior. That really became a trademark throughout the country building dozens of major churches and synagogues in this style. On the basis of this in the Boston Public Library, he's invited to lecture at MIT. This is difficult because he speaks no English, but he does it anyway with hand gestures builds the vaults and publishes a little book on it. If you ever find a copy of this book, please call me. Exceedingly rare, exceedingly important early book, and through the fame that he gets from this, at the centennial exposition, the Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he builds the Spanish Pavillion at that World's Fair, and he's invited to lecture at the Congress of Architects in August of 1893. Now who's at the Congress of Architects? The leading architects all across the country in the Bozar style, in this traditional historicist style. The architect for the administration building, of course, is Richard Morris Hunt. Hunt is there for Guastavino's address to the Congress. He says, "These buildings will go down in memory of great buildings of the world." So Hunt promptly sends plans to Guastavino, and by 1894, we see Guastavino vaults into the drawings for the Breakers, in Newport, Rhode Island, and for Biltmore. But these vaults came very, very late in Hunt's design process. I was fortunate to go into the archives and find the drawings by Hunt where he basically had drawings for the building with no Guastavino shown at all, and then with a yellow pencil, basically circled some areas, sent them off to the Guastavino company, and said, "What do you think you can do? Could you vault these?" And Guastavino not only comes back with vaulting designs, this is the gatehouse, of course. He not only comes back with designs for the areas that Hunt had identified, the porte-cochere, the loggia, as being places for the Guastavino vaulting, but Guastavino, being very shrewd, also said, "really, this swimming pool should have a vault as well, "and begins to insert himself into the building in other ways. And by the way, the Winter Garden, this would be much nicer with tile vaulting around the outside of it. So Hunt had not envisioned these spaces as having tile vaulting, and we have the drawings with Guastavino's pencil, I'm assuming it's Guastavino, sketching a circular dome in these corners and then sending it back. And we have to remember, this is a time period where, unlike today where you might have fifty drawings for a bathroom sink, in that time there might be ten drawings for a whole building. So the craftspeople were really left to carry out details and were trusted to do beautiful work, and this is one of the things that draws me to the story of Guastavino. His masons were trusted to do exceptional work by the leading architects. In the Guastavino archives, we find drawings like this giving sections through vaults, but because they were added so late, the systems many of them had already been designed, in some cases with iron beams rather than the vaults as load-bearing vaults. And this would be a trend that throughout the course of the company, they started out as a load-bearing construction structural system, and throughout the twentieth century, they became more and more decorative, and for me reaches a low in about 1950 when I found a drawing with tiles literally glued to the underside of a concrete slab. And at that moment I knew that Raphael, Sr., was rolling over in the crypt here in the Basilica. There's more room here in the front if people want to come in. I'm not offended. In fact, I'm overjoyed to see so many of you here. Guastavino, of course, comes and sees the Biltmore and says "you know, I'm a bit of a gentleman, and I think I'd like to have a vineyard, and you know, a chapel, and a pavilion on a lake, and a sprawling estate in the North Carolina hills." And so he buys land near Black Mountain, develops what came to be known as the Spanish Castle. And I should say that the work I have in the book on Guastavino here in North Carolina really builds on Peter's work, and the work of others, John Toms, here at the Basilica, which can be found in the North Carolina collection at the Pack Library. This is a later view of the house, but I want to make an important observation. He built the house in wood, not in his tile-vaulted construction system. Well, he was not a Vanderbilt. He didn't have the resources. It was a pretty expensive construction system, and so for his own house, and he did it in a hurry, he did it in timber. This has always been an interesting and curious fact. He did develop a design for a chapel in tile, and of course he bottled wine and cider here on his estate, which he called Rhododendron, today is Christ-Mount, which has a wonderful display on his life and work, which I highly recommend. We have very few pictures of Raphael, Sr. In the collection here is a rare photo of him on his porch at Black Mountain. He was a composer, he loved literature, he loved music. There was a concert of his music here at the Basilica some years ago, and this is still an unexplored area. So here we see him relatively late in life, and in the collection here at the Pack Library, there's a postcard with the marvelous little poem from a satisfied guest who said, "The poets may sing of the feasts of Lucullus, of champagne, and of Tokay and other things fine; but give me a dish of Mr. Guastavino's paella, and a bottle or two of his own pleasant wine." Paella is a very Valencian dish, and it's fascinating to see that he brought some of Valencia here to Black Mountain. Valencia is a marvelous city in Spain and I really recommend you visit it to see that other side of the story. While he's here, in a way retiring to Black Mountain, but still running the company and signing the checks and maintaining control and traveling up and down the east coast, he's writing, he's giving papers in Paris and Madrid on the function of masonry in modern construction. This is just the beginning of reinforced concrete and steel construction that's coming in to compete with him, and only a few years ago, the Basilica of St. Lawrence here was sent a collection of drawings that literally were pulled from the dumpster here in Asheville. In the late stages of my book going to press, John Toms called me and said "we've got some new drawings that have just turned up." These are undated. This is an earlier drawing because it looks quite different from the final facade of the Basilica. Here's a plan which very clearly says 1903 and R. G. which does not stand for Ralph Gibson. Raphael Guastavino's developing and design. There's misspellings. This is his hand for sure. He's working out the geometry. These drawings were later signed by Richard Sharpe-Smith, who was a licensed architect. Guastavino never finished his license in Spain. So he was not licensed to sign the word architect in Spain. That may have carried over; he may not have had the right here and so for that reason Sharpe-Smith may have played a role in the building. Another undated drawing that shows the closer to a final design development and so the whole story of the development of the Basilica in my mind is still waiting to be told, and I sketch out some of the details in the book but I think there are marvelous opportunities to tell the history of this building. And this building for me is not just of national importance but is of international importance. This building is one of the very few in the world where not only did Guastavino serve as the primary architect laying out a vision, but it's built top to bottom with the tile-vaulting system, with the decorative possibilities of ceramics. Originally the tile domes with exterior tile on the top of the domes. This is very common in Valencia. And I'm sorry I don't have a photo to show you of domes in Valencia, but I'm just urging you to go there and see them for yourself. Bright-colored, blazing domes. Valencia doesn't have the same freeze-thaw cycles that we have here, or used to have here. This did not hold up well in this climate, so in the end these were replaced, but it has held up well in Nebraska. I'm young; before I die I dream of maybe seeing these restored to their former glory. Of course, going all the way down to the crypt, we find tile vaulting, three-dimensional, load-bearing, structural surfaces, an unfinished staircase which is a treasure of construction for us because it gives us insight into the history of how they did it. We do not know all of the stairs that the company built in the U. S. When I arrived in Boston eight years ago, I went looking for a stair, and I arrived on the sight where literally they had torn down the ten-story stair the day before I arrived. It's an ongoing effort not only to document what's out there but to raise awareness and prevent it from being torn down. The dome on this building is an absolute feat of construction. I do not know how it was constructed. We could speculate about it but it's another fascinating question. It's an incredible interior space where not only as a feat of construction, the thinness of the dome, at about four inches thick, spanning on the order of eight-five feet in the long direction, four inches thick, no steel, a remarkable structure, thinner than an eggshell, has stood up very well for over a century now. Throughout we find decorative tile work that has close affinities with Valencia and Spain and another project that needs to be done is tracing the origins of these and relating some of the tile. Some of them I'm sure come from Spain. Detailed studies of the ceramic work in this Basilica need to be done because it's just a fascinating topic to see the influences of, but when you see this, this could be straight from nineteenth-century Valencian projects, which again are waiting to be teased out. We really have a vision, an architectural division by Guastavino, developed and carried forward by the son as well, and so I again just throw out a challenge in terms of studying the history of these beautiful ceramics, which for me are works of art of course, but are also puzzles to be solved. I like to call this the Guastavino memorial chapel. I don't know if anybody else likes to call it that, but Guastavino, Sr., helped pay for this. He provided about half of the money to build it, perhaps to make up for sins, many sins. This really became his final resting place. Here's the last photo we know of him that was published with his obituary in The Brick Builder. He of course is laid to rest. This work is speculated to have been done by his son, the design of his burial where he is buried with a pure heart, and for Guastavinians like me, people who've been afflicted by Guastavinitis, this is a pilgrimage sight. People will come from all over the world to see this building and his final burial, and he's only growing in popularity and influence. We're not quite at the scale of the pilgrimage of Santiago de Campostela yet, but I do forsee a day when more and more people come to see this Basilica, as well as the other great treasures here in Asheville, so it's important that not only we celebrate this work, but we study it, we try to understand it, we try to preserve it to pass it on to future generations, and in particular, I'm excited about the potential for the Basilica to develop a public plaza in front of it that helps really develop a public space. [applause] I guess I struck a chord. I'll just point out that buildings like the Pantheon in Rome today are marvelous to visit in part because they have a thriving public space in front of them. And that's true of the great cathedrals of Europe. That was not always true. In the Middle Ages houses were built up right up to the edge of the cathedral, and only later sometime in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the public spaces reclaimed in front. Any of you who have been to the great cathedrals or stood in front of the Pantheon in Rome know that these are some of the most important civic spaces that we have. So please do what you can to help celebrate this marvelous building.