![]() He was 65 years old and had a grand house in nearby Black Mountain, which he built after collaborating with architect Richard Morris Hunt on Biltmore House. In 1908, as he was completing work on the Basilica of Saint Lawrence in Asheville, North Carolina, Rafael Sr. “For my money,” Brownlee says, “that pair of spaces together represent some of the greatest Guastavino ever.” Even more austere, this wing serves as a solemn setting for the museum’s Egyptian art. The Coxe Wing, opened in 1926, contains two more Guastavino vaults, one supporting the other. Beneath that space is an extraordinarily shallow-domed auditorium with trapezoidal coffered vaulting and Arts and Crafts tile from the Rookwood Pottery Company in Ohio. “The Guastavino space is defined by revealed brick with almost no ornamentation,” says David Brownlee, professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania, “and you have the feeling that you’ve suddenly come into the 20th century-that you’ve entered a modern world of large, simple forms and very constrained decoration.”īut that’s just the beginning. Moving from the museum’s original wing, with its conventional Neoclassical interior, into the first of the Guastavino sections-the Harrison Wing, completed in 1915-visitors enter a great rotunda housing a collection of Chinese art. The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Museum in Philadelphia contains a trove of Guastavino vaults. During the late 1990s, the buff-colored, herringbone-patterned tile was scrubbed clean as part of a rehabilitation that carved out a 98,000-square-foot market, retail, and restaurant complex, which includes an event space called Guastavino’s. The market closed during the Great Depression, and the space became a storehouse for snowplows and other municipal equipment. Guastavino Company in 1909 to serve as a fruit and vegetable market. One of Manhattan’s lesser-known examples is the vaulted arcade under the approach to the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, designed and built by the R. In New York City, you can find more than 200 existing buildings containing Guastavino vaults-Carnegie Hall, the Bronx Zoo, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, Grand Central Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal. Look for vaulted ceilings in the Guastavino Room, the Map Room Tea Lounge, and the lobby, among other spaces. He employed different tile patterns throughout the library. Guastavino had never left his structural tiles exposed before, but now he’d hit on his signature look. The original plan for the library was to plaster over the vaults’ tiles, but McKim and Guastavino realized that the exposed tiles added beauty. His self-supporting tile arches were simultaneously lightweight, strong, and attractive-as well as fireproof, something McKim had demanded. Guastavino’s patented system was based on the principles of the tile vault, a Mediterranean technique dating to 1382 that uses thin clay tiles and plaster. Guastavino helped the firm achieve its vision for the first large, free municipal library in the United States-a monumental building with soaring, vaulted spaces that architect Charles McKim called a “palace for the people.” Yet by 1889 he was collaborating on the Boston Public Library with arguably the most dominant architectural firm of the day: McKim, Mead & White. He also lacked connections in New York City, where he arrived in 1881. ![]() emigrated from his home country of Spain, where he had begun to achieve success as an architect and master builder, he didn’t speak English. Without the Boston Public Library, we don’t have Guastavino coast to coast.” “If there’s one building that launched the career of the Guastavino family in America, it’s the Boston Public Library (pictured above),” says Ochsendorf, author of Guastavino Vaulting: The Art of Structural Tile. Since then, Ochsendorf and others have identified more than 600 existing Guastavino projects in 30 states and six countries, as well as many that have been destroyed. He caught what he calls “Guastavinitis” two decades ago as a Fulbright scholar in Guastavino’s home country of Spain. That’s changing thanks to the efforts of a few people-most notably John Ochsendorf, an MIT professor of architecture and civil and environmental engineering. Yet for most of the past century, the architectural contributions of these two immigrants have gone unrecognized. The soaring tile vaults of Rafael Guastavino and his son, Rafael Jr., grace some of America’s most iconic buildings.
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