Vaulted buildings are an important part of construction history and vernacular architecture still in use today, and yet their historical scrutiny is still unexplored. The project addresses this gap from an overall and comparative Iberian perspective to understand the vaulted buildings in written sources, particularly those produced within the framework of the 1755 Great Earthquake. It aims to establish and explore the relations between vaulted buildings in Spain and Portugal between the 17th and 19th centuries, and the vaults’ features through the use of Digital Humanities tools (digital paleography, text data mining and space syntax theory).
The project assumes that a network of vaults linked by vaulted buildings, allows to find trends and exceptions on the vaults’ complex universe of data attributes and case studies that otherwise was impossible to assess, prompting new questions. It is intended to verify to what extent the evolution of vaults and their construction techniques has been limited geographically, materially, geometrically or functionally, thus the identification of genotypes and phenotypes. For supporting this argument the project crosses methodologies from Architecture, Construction History and Digital Humanities.
The corpus under analysis derives from vaults’ references found mainly in two handwritten surveys done after the Great Earthquake: Effects of the 1755 earthquake in Spain (1755) and the Portuguese Parish Memorials (1758). Hence, the proposal also looks for a local perspective that goes back and forward to the 17th and 19th centuries by looking to Iberian surveys produced by religious-military orders.
The understanding of connections between Iberian vaulted buildings and vaults’ constructive system in a three-centuries time frame span will boost the knowledge of circulation processes of know-how of vaults and reveal dynamics of buildings’ changes, such as restoration, reconstruction and demolition. The project aligns with UN 2030 Agenda Goal 11 on fostering the protection and safeguarding of the cultural heritage of vaulted buildings, empirically understanding their behaviour in case of an earthquake, and on how to build sustainable and use local materials and systems.
Due to the richness of the primary sources, the subject uniqueness and the methodology novelty, the project is impactful and will be a stepping-stone for further studies. Among the expected outcomes, there are online products (a database-platform and an Atlas powered by the combination of Transkribus and Georeferenced softwares), dissemination actions (articles in international journals) and activities (conferences, workshop, optional course units and a summer course) to achieve an academic and general impact. This strategy to internationalise, network, disseminate and transfer knowledge through digital resources, make this project a contributing factor to the improvement of the host institution, and above all, to develop my career goals in the coming years.