How it began
Eladio Dieste was a Uruguayan civil engineer, born in Artigas in 1917, who graduated in Montevideo in 1943. His first experiment with reinforced brick came in 1946 and 1947, when the architect Antoni Bonet asked him to engineer the vaults of the Berlingieri house at Punta Ballena. In 1956 he founded the design and construction firm Dieste y Montañez with the engineer Eugenio Montañez, and nearly all his later work was built through it.
Metal-reinforced masonry had earlier precedents, including work by Paul Cottancin, Rafael Guastavino and Eduardo Torroja. Dieste was at first unaware of them and took the idea further, at a time when rising formwork and labor costs were making thin concrete shells uneconomical.
How it works
A Gaussian vault is a thin roof shell, usually a single layer of brick. Steel reinforcement is placed in the joints between the bricks, which are filled with sand and cement mortar, so the brick skin behaves much like reinforced concrete at lower cost and weight. The cross-section follows a catenary, the curve of a hanging cable turned upside down, so the brickwork carries its own weight almost entirely in compression.
Such a shallow, thin shell would tend to buckle. Dieste dealt with that by varying the rise of the catenary along the length of the building, which gives the surface a second curve and stiffens it. He called the principle resistance through form. The vaults were built on movable, reusable formwork that could be struck as soon as a day after laying. Spans reach about 45 meters, with a typical span-to-rise ratio of about 10.
How it spread
Dieste used the system for warehouses, factory sheds, markets, gymnasiums and churches. The Church of Cristo Obrero at Atlántida combines Gaussian vaults spanning 16 to 18 meters with undulating brick walls. A warehouse at the Montevideo docks, built from 1977 to 1979, is a well-studied large example. His firm built more than 1.5 million square meters of vaulted structures, with more than 140 reinforced ceramic works in Uruguay and others in Argentina, Brazil and Spain.
What lasted
Dieste's choice of brick was economic and ethical as well as structural: a cheap, locally made material laid by ordinary masons. Engineers have since checked his own calculation methods against modern finite element analysis and found the catenary geometry sound. His work is often placed alongside that of Félix Candela and other Latin American shell builders, and is described as structural art. Dieste y Montañez remains in operation.
