Hagia Sophia Essay

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The dome is a remarkable engineering and architectural innovation, perhaps made even more so by the fact that those who first employed it lacked the knowledge and technology advantages of today. By considering how a dome supports itself and its various loads as well as the stresses under which it is subjected, and the structures that allow for this to happen, it is not difficult to determine that the domes of antiquity, such as the Pantheon and Hagia Sophia were incredible structural feats in their own rights.
By its definition, a dome is a hemispherical form-resistant structure of small thickness (Salvadori, 2002). Their impressive stability is due to their continuous, curved shape that allows them to withstand bending, tensile, and compressive …show more content…

Originally, the dome, designed by Anthemius of Tralles, was not hemispherical. Most of the design was dictated in the space available to build the church and so Anthemius had to be creative. It was designed to span a rectangular surface and so had a different diameter in its X and Y directions. The dome spanned 31.87 m over its major axis and 30.37 m over its minor axis (Varma, Jangid, & Achwal, 2006). The dome was neither a full dome also, rising only 25 ft from its base whereas it would have risen 45 ft. following common convention. To reinforce this shallow dome, forty meridians were placed around the dome where they merged together at the crown (Varma, Jangid, & Achwal, …show more content…

This was in part due to the fact that his complex arrangement that supported the main dome had never been undertaken before and, therefore, how things would react was not completely understood. Also, while he correctly attempted to support the principal support structure with the secondary features (walls, semi domes, etc.), Anthemius did not foresee the larger than normal hoop stress that developed at the base of the main dome; a result of its shallow rise (Salvadori,

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