The underlying geometrical relationship in the shells of Eladio Dieste

Abstract

Only within the last decade, the works of Uruguay an Engineer Eladio Dieste (1917-2000) have been gaining international academic dissemination, one of whose main contributions in the realm of formal-structural conception within architecture and civil engineering reside in the iterative development of the structural typology of the gaussian vault shells in reinforced brickwork. However, there is not an established definition for this typology’s architectural geometry. Also, there is hardly any evidence of how such shells were designed. Therefore, the main objective, of this paper is to demonstrate the underlying geometric relationships in the discontinuous gaussian vault shells designed and built by Eladio Dieste in reinforced brickwork, the dominant typological variation within the object of study. This analysis was carried out by means of the parametric modeling and the polynomial regression of selected case studies from the primary sources, since such computational tools allow for the proper geometrical management of formally complex geometries. The expected contributions of this study reside in the deepening of the understanding of the relationship between the design process and the geometry of the object of study, as well as the understanding of the geometrical conformation of the structural typology conceived by Eladio Dieste.