Cell Vaults – Research on Construction and Design Principles of a Unique Late-Mediaeval Vault Typology

The design and construction principles of a special type of late-gothic vaults are analyzed. The approach of the research is the connection of detailed geometrical analyses of the vault shape and masonry texture, and experiments on models and in full scale. In first place, a critical revision of the current description in the technical literature of the 19th and 20th century is carried out, which is confronted with the archaeological evidence in a survey.

The necessity of a critical analysis of the historical technical literature is underlined, and an approach is presented which combines the geometrical analysis of 3-D-data from the survey with experimental archaeology. For the analysis of constructions with complex geometry, a method is shown using reverse geometric engineering and selective data acquisition on site by means of current measuring equipment.