Plaited Stereotomy. Stone Vaults For The Modern World

If the treatise of 1567 by Philibert de l’Orme, as Jean–Marie Pérouse de Montclos has noted, marks the felicitous union of the knowledge of the highest level of stonemason, the appareilleur, with the printing press, the text presented here conjoins the knowledge of the appareilleur with the computer. By marrying together, in a new way, computers, computer–guided tools, and topology, with a method of construction that may have seemed frozen in time, Fallacara and Tamboréro for years already have been working to shake up received ideas about the history and future of stereotomy. Far from the cliché of the stonemason limited to the restoration of historical monuments according to only a static learning, and far from weeping over a supposedly lost golden age of classical architecture, Etlin, Fallacara and Tamboréro – witch combine three sets of complementary backgrounds and interests – have been totally revisiting the range of possibilities that a stereotomic architecture can offer to the contemporary world, along with new perspectives about the past. «Voilà la première fois que j’ai inventé» said Philibert de l’Orme showing the trompe of the Bullioud hotel, at Lyon. And surely this was the first invention of stereotomy.Acrobatic, this stereotomy? Certainly. And through its acrobatic quality, this architecture is at once surprising, spectacular, anamorphic, and aerial… Allow yourself to be transported by the poetics of stereotomic vaulted space, whether old or new. Joël Sakarovitch Paris, 2008