Ancient Domes
Now suppose you want to make a dome. How would you do that using the idea of the arch?
During the Islamic Empire, in West Asia, architects there built the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem in the 600's AD, and, in the 700's, the Great Mosque of Damascus, which also has a dome. In the 800's, the Abbasids built the Great Mosque at Kairouan in North Africa, also with a small dome.
A Moscow church from 1475
Russian churches took over this style in the 1200's AD, and they have small onion-shaped domes.
About 1100 AD, after a big gap, architects in Europe began to build domes again. One example is the baptistry of Pisa. A really big dome was the later Duomo of Florence (1418).
To find out more about domes, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Arches to Zigzags: An Architecture ABC, by Michael J. Crosbie (2000). Shows what an arch is, or a gable, or an eave. For younger kids.
Eyewitness: Building, by Philip Wilkinson, Dave King, and Geoff Dann (2000). Lavishly illustrated, like other Eyewitness books for kids, and with good explanations of most architectural terms.
Dome: A Study in the History of Ideas (Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology, No 25), by E. Baldwin Smith (1985). By a specialist, for adults.
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