The Master of Fireproof Modernism

Michael Freeman Rafael Guastavinos tile vaulting for the now-closed City Hall subway station, inaugurated in 1904

If all politics is local, then much architectural history is also a neighborhood matter. Thus I harbor an abiding personal fondness for the ingenious structural creations of the Spanish migr master builder Rafael Guastavino (18421908). Time and again in old New York buildings, its a delight to lift up your eyes and unexpectedly find Guastavinos distinctive herringbone terracotta tile patterns overhead.

Many of those locales are straightforwardly utilitarian, such as Bridgemarket, a supermarket inside the Manhattan base of the Queensboro Bridge. Ive enjoyed countless lunches at the Guastavino-vaulted Oyster Bar, in Warren & Wetmore and Reed & Stems Grand Central Terminal of 19101913. (Not least among that restaurants pleasures is overhearing crystal-clear snatches of conversation projected across the noisy space through an uncanny whispering-gallery effect.)

And one of my favorite Gotham architectural pleasures is to stand at the front window of the downtown number 6 subway between the Canal Street and Brooklyn BridgeCity Hall stops to catch a fugitive glimpse of a phantom Guastavino masterpiece. His gorgeously tiled IRT City Hall station, inaugurated in 1904 as the southern terminus of Manhattans first underground mass transit line, has been closed to the public since 1945, but remains eerily well-preserved, testimony to the materials exceptional durability.

Most memorably to me, though, is having been married beneath the majestic ninety-one-foot-high Guastavino dome of I.N. Phelps Stokess St. Pauls Chapel of 19041907 at Columbia University. A crucial Guastavino connection occurred in that same space in 1961, when the art historian George R, Collins (my wife Rosemarie Haag Bletters dissertation adviser), had an epiphany that changed how architecture scholars understand a crucial chapter in the history of modern design.

During a memorial service in the campus church, Collins was suddenly struck by how closely its exposed terracotta tile vaulting resembled the work of Antoni Gaud, the maverick Catalan architectural genius on whom he was the leading authority. In fact, Gaud, who was a decade younger, had gone to the same Barcelona technical college as Guastavino, and it appears that Guastavino perfected the industrialized crafting of strong, thin, curving surfaces that Gaud would take to such memorable extremes in his unconventional biomorphic architecture.

Not only did Collins thereby establish a link between Guastavino and Gaud, but when the Guastavino family business folded in 1962 and its records were about to be discarded, he secured them for his schools Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, an invaluable act of cultural salvage. The Guastavino offices meticulous working drawings allow a full understanding of a structural methodology that would otherwise be lost to us today. In fact, many large architectural firms for whom the Guastavinos worked would confidently leave portions of their own blueprints blank but labeled Guastavino here to indicate that vaults would be skillfully filled in by their trusted collaborator.

This long overlooked inventor and his New York-and-Boston-based firm are now the subject of Palaces for the People: Guastavino and the Art of Structural Tile, a fascinating exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York curated by G. Martin Moeller Jr. of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. and the MIT engineering professor John Ochsendorf, author of the lucidly written and beautifully illustrated Guastavino Vaulting: The Art of Structural Tile. The MCNYs compact display, which occupies a single large gallery, includes drawings, photographs, plans, tile fragments, and an illuminating video that explains the Guastavinos proprietary masonry techniques.

In New York City alone, there are no fewer than two hundred fifty examples of Guastavinos quintessential contributionthe lightweight, low-tech, long-span vaulting technique that systematized and modernized a late-medieval masonry tradition based on terracotta tiles. Guastavino introduced his refinement of that age-old building method (which originated in Islamic practices brought to Spain by Moorish invaders) just when iron and masonry were giving way to steel and concrete as the favored structural materials of the industrialized world.

Born in Valencia, where the technology he expanded upon was devised in the late fourteenth century, Guastavino scored a youthful triumph with his Batll textile factory of 1871 in Barcelona. (The large and prosperous Batll family commissioned a number of other noteworthy buildings in that booming manufacturing city, including Gauds most celebrated residence, his dragon-like Casa Batll of 19041906.)

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The Master of Fireproof Modernism