Selective Naming

That’s circa 1900 Guastavino vaulting in a public building, supported by brick bearing walls with white glazed brick veneer. Guastavino has received a lot of well-deserved attention over the last twenty years or so, but there’s a phrase that I haven’t heard applied to it: structural honesty. Given that I wrote a rant against the use of that phrase less than 18 months ago, I’m not saying that it should be used. Just that it could be.

The idea of structural honesty came out of two linked developments: the introduction of skeleton framing in the late nineteenth century, and the spread of modernist architectural design after 1900. The first disconnected the idea of structure from walls, and the second gradually pushed walls towards less and less ornament and more and more transparency. In that context, “structural honesty” meant showing that the walls were not load-bearing and visually distinguishing the structural elements from other pieces of the building. Like the way that the Guastavino tile is actual load-bearing vaulting.

Structural honesty is an idea tangled up with modernity and Guastavino vaulting doesn’t look or act modern. The actual technology is a modern (i.e., late nineteenth-century) variation on an old Catalan building technique, but it’s hard to look at any form of masonry vault and see it in the same technological light as the steel beams elsewhere in this building. Any form of categorization has its gray areas, and no matter how you approach the specific building element of Guastavino vaults – from an architectural history perspective, or construction history, or technological history – it’s difficult to fit into a category. And if it’s not categorized, then it is inevitably excluded from category-based ideas.