Timbrel vault (Catalan vault)
Bóveda tabicada (de rasilla)
- Date
- c. siglos XIII-XIV · confidence low
- Place
- Aznalcóllar, Seville, Andalusia, Spain
- Credited to
- Mudejar builders and builders of the Crown of Aragon
- Field
- Tools
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
A vault made of thin layers of flat brick (rasillas) bonded with gypsum plaster that is closed without centering. The oldest European examples are 13th-century Mudejar ones, and the technique spread from Valencia to Aragon and Catalonia in the 14th and 15th centuries.
The technique has precedents in Islamic architecture (Isfahan, Marrakesh) and in the eastern Mediterranean; the place and date are those of the oldest surviving European examples (the zawiya at Aznalcóllar, mid-13th century), not those of a single inventor.
What it led to
- light, cheap vaults without centering in churches, staircases and civil buildings
- export to America by the Spanish Monarchy
- Guastavino took it to the United States in the 1880s and Gaudí used it on a grand scale