Guastavino: Time Traveler from Valencia in New York
In 1893, Rafael Guastavino built the Spanish Pavilion at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, modeled on the trading hall and tower of La Lonja de la Seda, Valencia’s fifteenth-century silk exchange. Four centuries and an ocean later, there it stood in Jackson Park, among the plaster palaces of a fair meant to announce the twentieth century. It is tempting to read that pavilion as the moment Guastavino brought the Mediterranean to America. He had arrived twelve years earlier.
Rafael Guastavino arrived in the United States in 1881. By 1893, he had patents, a company with “Fireproof” in its name, and vaults already built at the Boston Public Library to show for it. The Spanish pavilion in Chicago borrowed the appearance of Valencia’s Lonja. But what Guastavino had brought to America twelve years earlier was less visible and more consequential: a way of building.
The bóveda tabicada used thin tiles laid flat in overlapping layers. Fast-setting plaster mortar held the first layer in place; further layers, bonded with mortar, gave the vault its strength. This allowed builders to span rooms with shells just a few inches thick and little need for temporary support from below. The technique is documented in Valencia as early as the fourteenth century. By Guastavino’s time, it was an established craft: simply how one covered a room. He called his development of it cohesive construction, a name that described his understanding of how it worked rather than where it came from.
Guastavino was born in Valencia in 1842 and trained as a master builder in Barcelona, where he established his career and began experimenting with the system he would develop in America. Valencia had given him his first architectural landscape. Barcelona gave him the training and commissions through which he began to transform it.
He took his craft to a country whose cities kept burning—Chicago in 1871, Boston the following year—and offered a way to build that resisted fire. Tile does not burn. He combined traditional techniques with Portland cement, tested his vaults, calculated their strength, and patented his methods. A craft passed down through generations of bricklayers became the basis of an American patented construction system. And here we are, more than a century later, eating oysters beneath its vaults at Grand Central Terminal.
At La Lonja there is a stone spiral staircase, attributed to the master builder Pere Compte, that rises around an open well without a central column. At the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in Morningside Heights, the Guastavino Company built spiral staircases in tile that also leave the center open. I imagine going up one and coming down the other.
I should be careful here. The Lonja’s staircase is cut stone; the cathedral’s stairs rest on tiled vaulting. They share a form, not a structural system. And I have no document that puts the young Guastavino on Compte’s stair. But he grew up in the city around it. It is easy to imagine a future builder being drawn to a staircase that seems to turn around nothing. Whether he climbed it is another matter.
Whether that staircase was consciously recalled in the cathedral’s design, I cannot say. But the connection between Guastavino and the Lonja is more than an imagined childhood encounter: he helped reproduce the building in Chicago. And the staircase is not the only resemblance that interests me.
Carl Sagan liked to remind us how small our corner of the cosmos is. The corner I am tracing here is a few blocks wide. Walk through Valencia’s old center to the Cathedral, and behind it, on the Plaza de la Virgen, stands the Basílica de la Virgen de los Desamparados, with its oval dome. Across the square is the horrible fountain where the Turia reclines looking very much like Neptune. The fountain came long after Guastavino’s childhood; the basilica dates from the seventeenth century.
A Gothic exchange, a cathedral, an oval church: all within a boy’s walking distance. I find myself looking for echoes of that landscape in what he later built in America. They are resemblances, not proof that every vault began as a childhood memory. Still, once noticed, they are difficult to stop seeing.
There is a complication, and I would rather state it than smooth it over. Much of what we call Guastavino in New York belongs to the career of his son, Rafael Jr., who arrived as a child in 1881 and assumed full control of the company after his father died in 1908. The crossing dome at St. John the Divine, built in 1909, and the vaults at Grand Central belong to the younger Guastavino’s period of leadership. The knowledge crossed one more generation, as it had been crossing generations for centuries. That is rather the point.
We like to line the centuries up one behind the other: medieval, Renaissance, industrial, each politely retiring before the next. Buildings are less obedient. Skyscrapers and vaults descended from a medieval craft went up in the same city, in the same decades, sometimes on the same block. And developments of the older technique were the ones being patented.
In the 1950s, Le Corbusier, of all people, would use tile vaulting in the Maisons Jaoul near Paris, incorporating it into roofs that also used concrete. The old Mediterranean craft had found another place in modern architecture.
The pavilion in Chicago presented the past as a recognizable historical style. Guastavino’s vaults gave an inherited craft a new working life. He adapted it to American materials, regulations, buildings, and ambitions. In his hands, the past became the basis of an invention.
In February, I will visit Asheville, North Carolina, where the time traveler from Valencia rests in a side chapel of the Basilica of St. Lawrence. He designed the church with Richard Sharp Smith; his son completed it after his death. Above its main space stretches a broad elliptical tile dome.
The basilica has been linked to the Virgen de los Desamparados in his native city. I have not stood beneath its dome yet, and I want to find out how that relationship feels in person—whether the resemblance is as strong as I imagine, or whether I have been seduced by a pair of staircases and a pair of domes. Perhaps, standing there, I will recognize something of Valencia in North Carolina. Perhaps the galaxy really was portable.
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