Graphical Restoration of the Cupola of the Tower of San Bartolomé de Sevilla Based on Historical Photographs

Abstract

San Bartolomé is among the most beautiful neoclassical Sevillian temples of the era. The current building is the work of Antonio de Figueroa and successive architects between the 18th and 19th centuries. Despite the lack of historical blueprints and written sources, plans for reconstructing the cupola of the tower of the Iglesia de San Bartolomé de Sevilla, which disappeared around 1950, have been developed because of few existing material remains. These remains include a drum with only a few rows of bricks at the base of its support and basic photographs from various archives that have been analysed to reconstruct the cupola’s geometry, calculate its structure, and determine the morphology and materials of the construction elements. This study was conducted using observation, the principles of optics, and the laws of descriptive geometry. Based on the drawing obtained, the structural calculation was performed, and the construction proposal was developed. All these efforts were essential to the reconstruction project and the tower’s restoration. © 2020, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.