Das Freie Wölben über den Schlingrippen der Schlosskapelle Dresden

The freely formed vaults over the winding ribs of the Chapel in Dresden's Castle.

"... The art of vaulting was the first 'win' that construction had against gravity ... Man's spirit learned by dealing with stone as the building material how to determine the forces and laws of materials and how to plan to make them usable for his purposes ..." [1].
The same task as that which Götz Fehr described in 1961 for the Late Gothic craftsmen in Benedikt Ried presented itself to the authors for reconstructing the winding ribbed vault of the Chapel in Dresden's Castle, dating from 1556 1, where hardly any traditional knowledge had been handed down through the generations about how to build the spherically curved, vault springing: not only concerning the technology of freely formed vaulting but also regarding the materials.
The authors studied 2 the formulas for mortars and bricks in a process lasting several months on the basis of findings from surviving vaults and by means of the test models 3 which they used to test the materials' properties in connection with a freely formed vault before finally discovering how to use them successfully for reconstructing Dresden's Chapel.