For anyone who is interested in Renaissance architecture

[Scooter]

This is a great National Geographic documentary I watched last night about the building of the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence.

The octagonal dome of the basilica of Santa Maria del Fiore has towered over the city of Florence for over 600 years. 375 feet tall and weighing in at 37,000 tons, it still stands as the largest masonry dome on earth and is the icon of Renaissance ingenuity. But Il Duomo isn't just big. It's also revolutionary. Until construction began in 1420, domes and vaults had always been built with the aid of support - scaffolding to centre and support the masonry until the mortar dried, or flying buttresses that held up impossibly high ceilings. Filippo Brunelleschi, an eccentric goldsmith-turned-architect, invented completely new machines to hoist materials into the cupola, technology that was so ahead of its time that it wouldn't be duplicated until the Industrial Revolution. He designed platforms and stairways so meticulously that only one worker died in 28 years of construction. And, most impressive of all, he engineered an elaborate puzzle of four million interlocked bricks to build his dome, vaulting the void without scaffolding, while laying bricks angled almost perpendicular to the ground. It's an engineering feat that has never been duplicated. And there's a reason why - Brunelleschi never revealed how he did it.