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William Randolph Hearst's Spanish acquisitions, lay strewn for decades in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. In the 1990s, the remains of the Cistercian monastery were transported to Vina, California, to be restored and rebuilt on the property of the Cistercian Abbey of New Clairvaux. Phase one consisted of sorting and retrieving the building’s original dimensions from the recovered stones.
The original drawn plans and dimensions had been lost in a flood. To retrieve the portal arch radius dimensions, I worked with a mason to reset the arch stones first by joint alignment, on a horizontal mockup plane. This gave me a rough measure of the portal arch curve radius. The known historic measure of a Spanish foot equaling 11.26”, and a lead from my studies of harmonic proportions, relating to the holy trinity, which were used in monastic buildings of the 12th Century, resulted in a precise first dimension.The arch and vault radii would be dividable by 3 and so adapting the near rough measures of the voussoir joint layout, I recovered the portal arch and vault radii's to be 3, 9 and 12 Spanish feet. With more geometrical logistics the complete interior dimension came back to light. |
