Craft-inclusive Construction: Design Strategies for Thin-tile Vaulting
Design and digital analysis tools can be a fertile space in which situated building knowledge, represented in crafts, act in dialogue with methods of construction. This research examines this possibility in thin-tile vaulting - a Mediterranean ceiling-craft technique that employs less material, but more skill, than the conventional construction with reinforced concrete. Through historical analysis of buildings, ethnographic, and purpose-designed case studies, the research intersects three areas in the built environment: material limitations, vernacular construction, and building technology. The study focuses on three approaches to craft-inclusive construction: policy, training, and design. The policy approach is extracted from two historical studies on the industrialisation of thin-tile vaults in Cuba during 1960s and Syria during 1980s. The training approach is an ethnographic study that examines training programmes of vaulting during the construction of three thin-tile vault projects in Rwanda, Jordan and Spain. Learning from the two previous aspects, the approach to design uses design-build methodologies to explore how digital analysis tools can mediate between technology, policy, and labour for a craft-inclusive construction of vaults. This design-focused approach explores material alternatives, off-site manufacturing, and recyclable formwork for thin-tile vaulting. My PhD finds that construction for environmental resilience operates within the same limitations as vernacular construction. While local building crafts are useful for sustainable construction, they are usually excluded from policies and 'formal building regulations' as they are inherently difficult to be abstracted into codes. The thesis concludes that architectural design can play a decisive role in bridging this gap. At a policy level, architects can play an essential role in demystifying building crafts by using digital modelling and analysis to understand how they work. At a design level, they can develop construction tools in conversation with craftspersons to help the latter to find new possibilities of their craft, build faster, or build more efficiently.
thin-tile vaulting, construction, craft, architecture
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