Coupoles

It is a famous Parisian brasserie, but prior to that it is a roofing technique that has fascinated man since earliest antiquity. How can one set up a hemisphere on four walls without making the whole thing come falling down? From the simple corbelled construction to the dome on pendentives, all the way to the current solutions that the new flexible and resistant materials allow today (PVC, special steels, etc), we have come a long way. The technical aspect will undoubtedly remain mysterious for the uninitiated, but they will have embarked on a beautiful journey through time and space, from the villages in Cameroun with their strange bomb-shaped cabins to the church of Saint Sophie in Istanbul, from the Bon Marché department store in Paris to the geodesic domes created by Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983). The latter, a genius in his own style, projects into a world of science-fiction with his project of a 3 kilometre in diametre dome over Manhattan. He imagined it in 1964 but it has not yet been carried out…

• Coupoles, by Jean-Jacques Terrin, Hazan editions, 2006, ISBN: 2754100318, price 47 €