[rejected by the Atavist, 2021]
Somewhere during the three years that I spent following the development of a three thousand pound bricklaying robot named SAM, I began to seek inspiration from a bricklayer whose form was less hot-dog cart than human. I wanted, as it were, an analog: a mason so fast and productive that his record spoke — or stood — for itself. I looked and looked, and as it turns out, there’s no such thing as famous American bricklayer.
An unemployed bricklayer once wrote a best seller, and briefly acquired fortune and prominence, but it faded fast. Where his father was buried alive in concrete, and his grandfather had been crushed to death in a tunnel, he drank with Hemingway, met the pope, and married a showgirl at a ceremony performed by Mayor La Guardia. All of this left him uprooted. “I became too sophisticated for bricklaying,” he said, “and too confused to write.” He died in 1992 and has been mostly forgotten. School kids read John Steinbeck, not Pietro di Donato. Another bricklayer who put pen to paper was Frank Gilbreth. For having built MIT’s Lowell Laboratory in ten weeks, he was known around Boston as the city’s fastest builder. He also had twelve children, and is now remembered as the dorky dad in Cheaper by the Dozen.
After those guys, every other contender is a stretch. It was in the house of a master bricklayer that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but good luck recalling his name. Yogi Berra’s dad was a bricklayer, and left us with precisely zero funny quotes. If anything, bricklayers are infamous. A bricklayer started the Reichstag fire, and a bricklayer tried to assassinate FDR. Even the mythic bricklayer Renaud de Montauban left a sad legacy. To atone for his sins, he’d been working for free on the cathedral in Cologne when, after a week, his fellow masons couldn’t take it anymore. He was ruining their wages, so they hit him with a hammer and tossed him in the Rhine.
There were, though, two masons — a father and son — whose exceptional and prolific work remains unrivaled. They didn’t build flat walls out of bricks, though. They built domes and vaults out of clay tiles. Their names were Rafael Guastavino.
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There are two obvious ways to make an arch (and thus a vault). One way is to build a strong wooden frame, and, using scaffolds, install masonry above it, filling in the unparallel gaps with mortar. Once the masonry is bound by mortar, remove the frame, and voila. The other way is to cut or shape the masonry units into trapezoidal blocks instead of rectangular blocks, such that, stacked upon one another, they evenly and uniformly comprise the desired curve. This takes not only serious scaffolding, and formwork, but skill. Sometime in the 14th century, masons in Valencia, Spain, developed a third way, called tile vaulting. They figured out how to build large masonry arches, quickly, with lightweight mass-produced tiles. The secret was plaster of paris, which hardens quickly. It hardens so quickly that a mason could butter the edges (not the faces) of a tile, hold it against the edges of other tiles, and then let go. In this manner, masons set one layer, or course, of tiles, each half the thickness of a brick. On top of that first course, they then laid another. In this one, though, they offset the joints and orientation, and instead of using plaster of paris, they used mortar. On top of that course, they placed a third course, offsetting the joints and orientation again. The result: a hard rock shell, strong enough to support a floor, a staircase, or a roof.
In 1382, a mason named Juan Franch used this technique to build the Jofre Chapel, in the monastery of Santo Domingo, and this structure caught the attention of King Peter IV of Aragon. The King was passing by, perhaps planning for the construction of the Royal Palace. Somewhere between Valencia and Algeciras the magnitude of the technique registered in his royal mind, for there 63-year old King Peter sent a letter to the mayor of Zaragoza, informing him of a “very lightweight, and of low cost” construction method— and went so far as to suggest the mayor go see it with his own eyes. He also told the mayor to send the masons of his court in Zaragoza two hundred miles south to investigate. Shortly thereafter, he appointed Franch a master mason at the Royal Palace.
The technique spread quickly north, to Barcelona and into France, where it was used in churches. Before Don Quixote was published, it was in Madrid. In 1639, Friar Lorenzo de San Nicolas published a treatise on the technique — the first ever — and this helped it spread faster than Rocinante through Europe. By the mid 18th century, tile vaulting was widespread in France, and the obsession of a retired army officer named Comte Felix Francois d’Espie. He, too, wrote a small book on the technique, fawning over its fireproofness, and it was translated into many languages. By the end of 18th century, tile vaulting was brought to the New World, in the form of the Friar’s book in the hands of a different friar. Friar Domingo de Petres use the technique to build an observatory and a cathedral, among other fine buildings, in Bogota, Colombia. In North America, though, the technique remained unknown, until a Spanish builder named Rafael Guastavino Moreno II arrived in New York, in 1881.
The son of a cabinetmaker, Guastavino had been captivated by architecture since boyhood. A natural draftsman, he’d studied mechanics, geometry, and construction at the Escola Especial de Mestres d’Obres (the Special School for Masters of Works) with the same professors who taught Gaudi. Before he he graduated in 1864, a professor there once told him, “The architect of the future will construct imitating nature.” He studied and practiced masonry, gaining unusual perspective on its aesthetic potential, and learned the ancient technique called tile vaulting. He’d designed and built his own house, a couple of factories, and two mills, one of which took two years to build. It took up four blocks, and used an astonishing number of bricks, culminating in elaborate cornices. It also included a 200-foot-tall brick chimney with an impressive tapered octagonal base. The enormous central room, nearly as big as two football fields, was made entirely of a series of tile vaults supported by iron columns. The staircases and entryways were made using tile vaulting. It was a big start for a young builder, and earned Guastavino acclaim not just as a builder but as a project manager. And then, as he was beginning work on a stately theater, his wife, having discovered his latest infidelity, took their three eldest sons and decamped for Argentina. Not yet 40, Rafael Guastavino Moreno II was left with with his mistress and his youngest son, 9-year old Rafael Joseph Guastavino III.
In New York, what greeted Guastavino was not the Statue of Liberty, but the stone towers of the unfinished Brooklyn Bridge, with their Gothic arches. They were the tallest things in sight. Rafael II didn’t speak English, but he surely understood them.
He struggled to make inroads. He’d brought letters of introduction with him, but bungled interviews with architects. They saw a short but dignified man, dark and flamboyant, and enthusiastically confident – and they weren’t sure what to make of him. To demonstrate his knowledge of tile vaulting — or timbrel vaulting, as he called it — Guastavino used his not insignificant savings to build two blocks of tenement housing in Manhattan. It didn’t go well, because the tiles he used were bad, and he lost everything on the job. At this, his mistress returned to Barcelona — where at least she could get wine and olive oil. Guastavino and his son moved into his office on west 14th St. — and to avoid suspicion, pretended to be very busy working.
With little else to do, Guastavino drew some designs for a magazine doing a piece on the Spanish Renaissance — and this caught the attention of an architect working on the Progress Club. He asked Guastavino to submit a design, and Guastavino’s design won. So the Spaniard built a club on Lexington Avenue, and drew eyes. From then on, his introductions to prominent architects went better, and quickly they commissioned his work. Guastavino also learned how to sell it. Tile vaults, as he well knew, were fireproof — and fireproof construction, he discovered, was en vogue, because American cities, composed predominantly of wood buildings, had been destroyed by massive conflagrations. In the decade before Guastavino arrived, fires gutted Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, and Portland, Oregon. The Chicago fire burned six square miles, and destroyed nearly 20,000 buildings. Tenements fell so fast and frequently that people said it sounded like an earthquake. The Baltimore fire burned for 30 hours, and destroyed 1500 buildings. In Portland, 20 blocks were destroyed. In the Atlantic Portland, a fire left 10,000 people homeless. Denver, more campground the city, was leveled by fire. Nearly the entirety of Sacramento was lost to a fire. Downtown St. Louis was gutted by flames when a steamboat caught fire, and drifting past the waterfront, set it and three dozen more boats ablaze. New York suffered, too. The first time, during the British Occupation, a third of the city was destroyed, and until it was rebuilt, people hunkered down under canvas sails tied to chimneys. Two years later, fire broke out again. New York’s third major fire, in 1835, consumed 17 blocks and destroyed 600 buildings. It burned so hotly that it melted copper roofs, and burned so brightly that it was visible in Philadelphia. In each city, builders (and lawmakers) turned away from timber to brick and stone — but ran out of options as they built floors. They ran out of money, too. So they listened to the Spaniard who said he could build just what they needed.
Guastavino built a synagogue on Madison Avenue, and then some stately brick row houses (known as the “red and whites”) just west of the Museum of Natural History, on 78th St. By then, Guastavino was becoming a specialist in vault construction, and the owner of those row houses encouraged him to patent his technique. This he did in 1885. Thus, we have a record of the speed of assimilation, for only an American would dare patent a 500-year old craft.
Guastavino submitted designs for a number of projects. The most prominent was for the Boston Public Library. The jury rejected his design. Then again, it rejected everyone else’s. Instead, the trustees of the to-be-library hired the architecture firm McKim, Mead, and White to design the building. They also did two other things: they insisted that the new building be fireproof (the books would present enough of a fire hazard), and they introduced Guastavino to Charles
McKim. As it happens, McKim had in mind vaulted spaces evoking palaces of the Italian Renaissance – but he planned to build them by plastering over iron beams, which he’d already purchased. Guastavino talked to McKim — likely mentioning his recent establishment of the Tile Fireproof Building Company — and then went to Boston and met with the superintendent on the construction site. Guastavino made an unusually good impression. He convinced the superintendent to sell the iron beams, and let him build the floors.
He started the ground floor a week later, as the leaves on the elms in Boston Common emerged. Two weeks after that, he built a small sample vault and demonstrated its strength by stacking up 12,000lbs of material on it. It held 550 pounds per square foot, which so impressed McKim that barely three weeks later the library’s plans were altered to allow for tile vaulting throughout the library. For two weeks in June, his workers installed 400 square feet of vaulting a day. Guastavino said he said he could double that pace if necessary. Construction was not delayed. Not only was his vaulting structural, but it was gorgeous, because Guastavino realized he could leave the bottom layer of tile exposed. By July, he’d earned $85,000 from the library — one of the finest buildings in New England — and with it started a new company bearing his name: the Guastavino Fireproof Construction Company.
Guastavino’s career was ascendant again, only steeper. McKim, Meade, and White not only incorporated Guastavino’s designs in their projects, but began to rely on them, and vouched for his technique. “I would not hesitate to place my entire confidence in the Guastavino system,” McKim wrote to Purly and Philips. By March of 1891, Guastavino Sr. (with Jr. as an apprentice) was working on twenty buildings in New York City, including the new Edison Electric building (the original power station had burnt down), Mt. Sinai Hospital, the Plaza Hotel, the Bloomington Building, and Carnegie Hall. He was also working on ten buildings in Boston, two in New Hampshire, one in Pennsylvania, one in Rhode Island, and one in New Jersey. The little office in Manhattan, three blocks west of Columbus Circle, couldn’t keep up. So he opened offices in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Providence. He already had one in Boston.
Yet Guastavino grossly underestimated costs, frequently losing money on jobs. At least one contractor never paid Guastavino — and the Guastavino Fireproof Construction Company went bankrupt. When the company was reformed, Guastavino, Jr., more careful than his father, was granted two thirds of its ownership.
Guastavino didn’t let financial troubles slow him down. For the Chicago World’s Fair, he designed the Spanish pavillion. In the White City, Guastavino built a turreted castle in the style of Valencia’s silk exchange building. To the Congress of the American Institute of Architects, which met in Chicago, he gave a lecture on the history of masonry construction – and derided modern intrusions into the the traditional craft. Concrete he called weak and expensive. Steel frames he called “a human skeleton only enveloped with the skin.” He said they lacked “artistic life and soul.” Lath and plaster he called papier mache. (Wood he’d already derided as “perishable and inferior.”) He cited the Pantheon and the Hagia Sophia. The Beaux-Artistes ate it up. Louis Sullivan, the modernist skyscraper designer, couldn’t take it. More than a quarter century later, he called the “violent outbreak of the Classic and Rennaissance” that began at the World’s Fair a contagion, claiming it contaminated everything that it touched. This dreadfull old stuff blanketed his brain, and he feared its manifestations would last more than half a century. It lasted longer than that.
Sullivan aside, Guastavino made a good name with many architects in Chicago, including Richard Morris Hunt, who had been hired by George Washington Vanderbilt II to build the largest private home in the America. Into the Biltmore Guastavino’s vaults soon went. He vaulted the corridors around the winter garden. He vaulted the swimming pool. He vaulted the port- cochere and the entrance hall. He vaulted the redbrick gatehouse – so that, as you enter the 8,000- acre estate — the one with five dozen fireplaces — the arched tile is one of the first features you see.
By 1903, Guastavino was producing more than 200,000 tiles per year in an elegant new brick and stone factory in Woburn, Massachusetts. The factory was called La Ceramica. Junior had designed it. Its entrance hall is vaulted. Its window arches are made of stone. Its squat buttresses are capped in tile. Its floor, a mosaic of broken tiles, includes the company name, and Senior’s signature in black. His G is not timid. Above it, there’s a slender arc, three layers thick. Guastavino’s name was on every tile the factory produced. As with bricks, the tiles were made with frogs. His, one by six by twelve, said R. GUASTAVINO, in big block letters.
Guastavino had built a 70-foot dome at NYU’s Gould library, and rebuilt the 70-foot dome in the Rotunda at the University of Virginia. The original, made of wood, had been built by Thomas Jefferson. He enchanted the Army Corps of Engineers, and earned the praise of Cadafalch. He vaulted The Breakers. He vaulted the Minnesota State Capitol. Using 50,000 green, ivory, and brown tiles, he vaulted City Hall Station: “the Mona Lisa of subway stations.” It made life underground seem sublime. He built a dome from whose center hangs a 24-ton lantern. For the Tiffany Building, he built a dome with an oculus the size of a blimp. To a movement that aspired to beautify civic spaces, he contributed amply.
Imitating Vanderbilt, Guastavino bought land in North Carolina, and built a big wooden house that he called Rhododendron. Wood might have been “perishable and inferior,” but it was also cheap and plentiful. Neighbors called the place the Spanish Castle, which suited Guastavino, because the land reminded Guastavino of the hills near Barcelona. When Guastavino married in 1894, he and his wife spent their honeymoon building their new house there. Eventually, across a thousand acres, it had a kiln, a pond, a farm, a bell tower, a wine cellar. Guastavino made his own wine, and put it in bottles labelled Rhododendron. Rhododendron doesn’t grow in Valencia, but grapes do.
Into his sixties, he worked hard. At the base of the belltower he engraved a phrase he’d heard in Spain: “labor prima virtus.” Labor is the chief virtue. To his wife he was baldy, but to others he was fastidious, tempered, and not the easiest to get along with. His favorite expression was “absolutely wrong.” Second favorite: “completely wrong.” But he was also courtly, and dignified, and in North Carolina he relaxed a little bit. He wrote waltzes, as he dreamed of as a boy, and wrote about masonry, which he mastered as an adult. Structure and form danced through his mind. During construction of projects, he was so excited he couldn’t sleep. He often awoke before many night owls close their eyes. When he did sleep, he dreamt of a building the world’s largest brick dome, spanning 200 feet or more. Maybe, just maybe, god would allow it, as in a cave. Sometimes he sat in a rocking chair on the porch. He had guests over, and insisted they sample his viticulture. One wrote,
The poets may sing of the feasts of Lucullus,
Of champagne, and of Tokay, and other things fine;
But give me a dish of Mr. Guastavino’s paella,
And a bottle or two of his own pleasant wine.
In his last year, he worked as an architect, as he’d once intended. He limited his designs to catholic churches. He designed one in Wilmington, North Carolina, and another in Asheville. This last church he designed in the Spanish Renaissance style, inspired by Valencia’s Basilica de los Desamparados – the Basilica of the Helpless. To this last church, the Basilica of St. Lawrence, Guastavino put up half the cost of construction — far more than he’d put toward his company’s tile factory in Woburn. To this church, he donated all of the tiles used in its various vaults — in its huge eliptical dome, its floors, towers, stairs, and ceilings. Through 1907, he superintended its construction. Early in the new year he went to Boston, and caught a cold. The chill turned into lung congestion, and then kidney problems. He died three weeks later, at Rhododendron.
Four thousand miles from Valencia, in a Valencian church named after an Aragonese saint, Rafael Guastavino was laid to rest.
According to his treasurer, Guastavino had considered architecture “one of the noblest callings of man.” He’d been alert, quick, and industrious. He’d been so resourceful that, with little notice, he was always able to incorporate vaults into buildings in various stages of construction. He was “an ardent lover of the truthful and the beautiful in the arts.” He made masonry godly.
The New York Times identified Guastavino as an architect, spelled his name incorrectly, and got his age wrong by a decade. It also called him an “authority on new methods of construction.” Only a paleogeologist could call his method new. La Vanguardia, in Barcelona, got it right. It called Guastavino “a genius inventor among the Yankees.”
The Brickbuilder wondered if there was anyone left who could carry on building as Guastavino had. There was: his son.
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Rafael Joseph Guastavino, III, innovated more than his father.
He built bigger vaults, and thinner vaults, and more ornate vaults, and built them without scaffolding. He accomplished this by laying tiles in concentric circles, starting at the walls, and moving inward and upward toward the center. Onlookers thought the masons perched so high above the ground were brave. They weren’t. They were smart. On New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, this method rescued the building from costly delays, and enthralled the media. The dome, only four and a half inches thick at the crown, spanned one hundred and thirty five feet. That was a body length shy of the Pantheon, and within arm’s reach of St. Peter’s and the Duomo. The Engineering Record reported coolly that Guastavino vaulting compared “favorably” with the “noble structures of ancient times.” Guastavino, Jr’s method was better than favorable. He spanned St. John the Divine in a season. In Florence, on the Duomo, Brunelleschi spent 14 years.
Within a decade on his own, he’d mastered shells in equilibrium. Though he’d given up school at 13, and never learned algebra, Junior had been introduced to graphic statics, and had learned to draft under his father. His father had recognized that draftsmen are often superior to the architects who employ them, and Junior’s talents made him proud. Junior’s talents took masonry to new heights. For the Elephant House at the Bronx Zoo, Jr. built a dome resting partly on another offset dome. For the National Museum of Natural History, he showed off even more, piercing the top of his dome with a ring of a dozen circular windows and a mullioned oculus. In the Phipps Natatorium, he supported a long central arch with walls of five arches apiece. In his domes, he knew when to employ steel bars between courses, for tension — to contain the outward thrust. He knew where, between inner and outer domes, to use flying buttresses. He built vaulted staircases that seem to defy gravity, and float in place. The Engineering Record should have said that he surpassed the medieval masters. Not one of his vaults ever failed.
He got fancy with decorative tile work. He left raised joints, and set intricate patterns. Taking this further, he began, like an Italian artist, to set the decorative lower layer of tile last, from scaffolds. He made custom tiles, based on watercolor paintings, or showing fairy tales.
He built shallow vaults — so shallow they seem impossible. One, over a 50-foot span, rises less than two and a half feet. Such domes suggest life under a tent. That’s what the ceiling of the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Terminal feels like. Not even the faux-teepees of Denver’s airport, made of actual fabric, compare. The Della Robbia room at the Vanderbilt Hotel is even wilder. It resembles a sheet held aloft, like something dreamt up by Christo. A light sheet of masonry, pulled taut at the corners, in white herringbone, bordered with blue stripes and flowers and filigree. It is unrivaled. It may house the only bar in New York where the ceiling outshines the single malts.
Like his father, Junior patented a wedge of masonry. Partnering with Wallace Sabine, the Harvard professor, Junior had developed a soundproof tile, called Akoustolith. Incorporating ground pumice, it absorbed six times more sound than any other masonry unit. Akoustoliths rendered a Montclair sermon clearly audible from wall to wall. Choirs hated it. They said it made singing as dead as a doornail. Junior didn’t seem to take offense. Soundproof tile, he figured, would improve the quality of life for humans stacked atop one another in cities.
Junior, who’d taken over his father’s company at age 22, and finished his father’s church, couldn’t get enough masonry through his blue eyes. With his wife, he traveled around Mexico, taking in cathedrals in Puebla, Guadalajara, San Luis Potosi. At each site, he got permission to go up on the roof and take photos. They explored the Grand Canyon, and I suspect this bolstered Junior’s impression of what strong red earth could do. They toured the Mediterranean. He and his wife climbed the pyramid of Giza. They checked out cathedrals in Paris, Rome, Venice, and Valencia. A fan of the water, Junior also explored Capri’s Blue Grotto — a limestone sea cave, lit by emerald water, that was pretty much the natural architecture his father had been taught to admire. He and his wife travelled for so long that they missed the departure of the boat they’d booked. It was the Titanic.
His honeymoon, too, had involved construction. It was cut short by his work on St. John the Divine. Once finished, Junior took his wife up to the peak of the dome. They’d lived in Brooklyn, but wanted a house on the water, and Junior found a spot on Pentaquit Point in Bayshore, Long Island. The filled-in marsh was not ideal for building a heavy masonry building, but Guastavino solved the problem. Unlike his father, Guastavino built his own house using tile vaulting – which put him in very high domestic company. So extensively did he deploy tile that the house he built seemed mostly bathroom. But it was three stories tall — so tall, you could easily see the water. Sitting in the dining room, it felt like you were eating dockside. Dockside there was a 36-foot sailboat that Guastavino regularly sailed over to Fire Island. She was called Don Quixote.
In 1915, Guastavino produced nearly a million tiles. But concrete — which his father had once demeaned — was a posing a real threat, because it outperformed masonry. It outperformed masonry in that it allowed German engineers to build the biggest dome in history: Century Hall. Built in 1913, it was as big as the dome Senior had dreamed of only five years earlier. Reinforced with steel, the dome in Breslau outdid the Pantheon, and not by a small margin. Quickly, German engineers figured out how to make reinforced concrete domes thinner, which meant cheaper. Surely it was a bad omen when, in 1934, builders of the Hayden Planetarium chose a German concrete design over tile vaulting. Two years later, it must have stung more when the title of the the largest structure in the country went to the Hershey Sports Arena. Its reinforced concrete dome spanned 220 feet.
Steel structures had already surpassed masonry: St. Pancras Station, built in London before Junior was born, spanned 245 feet. The Galerie des Machines, built for the 1889 exposition in Paris, upped the span to nearly four hundred feet. It enclosed a space so grand it left people discombobulated. Given the encroachment, you’d think Guastavino would not have underestimated and dismissed concrete. But like all masons (and the bricklayer’s union), he did. Concrete had no class, because it had no history. Its uniformity drew attention to its imperfections, while an assemblage of small masonry units did the opposite. But laying tiles by hand required a lot of labor, and labor became far more expensive than materials. By the 1950’s, it was possible to built a 130-foot dome out of concrete for less than half the cost of a masonry dome. And the French showed, in 1958, that you could build something far longer than 130 feet. Their Centre des Nouvelles Industries et Technologies exhibition hall, in Paris, laid claim to the world’s biggest concrete dome. It spans 715 feet.
By the time Guastavino, Jr, countered, it was too late. Around 1930, he produced an advertisement for his tile vaulting system. It had a drawing of his vaulting in the Western Union Building, an Art Deco masterpiece. In it, the tile looks just like brick, and the brickwork is so ornate it looks like a wizard remodeled the wine cellar of a French chateau. Across the top of the page, it said, THE MODERN TREND. But the modern trend wasn’t masonry. It was Minimalism, and the International style. To Philip Johnson, vaulting looked plain antiquated. Frank Lloyd Wright chose concrete over tile. Le Corbusier held his tongue.
By the 1940’s, the company’s prospects looked bleak. New building codes called for structural calculations that were impossible to perform, and the stable of architects who’d long worked with the Guastavinos were retiring. Guastavino advised his son, Rafael IV, to seek work beyond the family business – and he took up sailing. Then Guastavino sold the business to his longtime treasurer. Within years, he closed the company offices in New York and Boston. Less than a decade later, he died. His son took over, and eked it out for eight more years, before shuttering the company in 1962. The last building the company worked on was the Cathedral of St. Philip, in Atlanta: Greek allusions all around.
Rafael Junior died October 19, 1950, as the world he’d built out of earth seemed to be changing faster than ever. The Yankees had swept the world series for the sixth time, but the Soviet Union had tested an atomic bomb, the State Department was full of communists, a man had flown faster than sound, and within a month, TV would be broadcast in color. Like his father, Guastavino at the end of his life dreamed of enormous vaults — in the form of airship hangars. And like his father’s dream, it too would be partly realized, in scope but not stuff. He was buried at St. Patrick Cemetery, in Bay Shore, Long Island – itself testament to the durability of stone. His granite tombstone is humble. It is low and flat, adorned only with a small cross. It faces south, toward Fire Island — as if Junior is keeping one eye on his father and the other on his homeland.
Of the Guastavino’s work, Ralph Adams Cram called it “honest, straight masonry construction.” This was high praise, for Cram thought that masonry that did what it it looked like it did — support enormous edifices — was the ultimate, the ideal architecture. He thought it would stand for two thousand years.
In New York city alone, Guastavino and his father built libraries, hospitals, college halls, train stations, boathouses, public baths, mausoleums, police stations, armories, and museums. Senior built the Met. Junior built the Frick. (Compare them to the Guggenheim, which Frank Lloyd Wright built with 7,000 cubic feet of concrete.) From the Battery to the Cloisters, they built synagogues and churches, apartments, hotels, and banks. Junior built the New York Stock Exchange. Junior built the stairs in Washington Arch. Senior built the dome inside the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial. Junior built roofs in Penn Station (*Though Penn Station is gone, the stately soaring arches of Buffalo Central Terminal are even more impressive.) A courthouse, an engine house, a marine terminal, and a branch of the YMCA in the city all owe their existence to the Guastavinos. Ellis Island’s Registry Hall was built by the younger Guastavino, which means that millions of immigrants, entering the United States of America for the first time, stepped into a building built by an immigrant, in view of a statue designed and built by foreigners. (*When Statue of Liberty renovated in 1980s, Ellis Island was also fixed up. Of all 28,000 tiles Guastavino had laid, only 17 needed replacing.) There remains one place in New York called Guastavino’s. It’s under the Manhattan approach to the Queensboro bridge, and had been a public market of unprecedented beauty until the Great Depression. After years boarded up, it’s a glorious space for private events.
All told, the Guastavinos built more than 600 buildings in 30 states. They’re all cathedrals: the Lion House at Lincoln Park Zoo. The ampitheatre at Arlington National Cemetery. The Massachusetts State House. The National Archives. State capitols in Louisiana, Minnesota, West Virginia, and Nebraska — the latter being known as the “cathedral of the prairie.” A chapel at Princeton, a library at Harvard, a rotunda at Yale, a museum at the University of Pennsylvania, a hall at Cornell, a hospital at Dartmouth. The Cannon House Office Building and the Russell Senate Office Building. Grace Cathedral. The National Cathedral. The Supreme Court. Nearly the only thing one Guastavino or the other didn’t build was the Washington Monument, and only because it was the wrong shape.
One historian, William Ware, praised Guastavino vaults by calling clay the grandest stuff (“the most indestructible material produced by the arts”) and domes the grandest form. “The charm of a dome,” Ware wrote, “lies not in its shape but in one’s conception of it, in the idea that it is self- supported and hangs in the air. It is even more captivating to the mind than the eye.” As such, he called the work of the Guastavinos daring and honest, as good a combination as any, especially for father and son.