Read The Dome: A Complete History

No other form has served so many faiths, empires and technologies, or outlasted so many of them. The dome began as a roof corbelled over a tomb, became in Rome a concrete heaven pierced by a single eye, learned in Byzantium and Islam to float on pendentives, squinches and muqarnas, and was reinvented in Renaissance Florence by a goldsmith who refused to use centring. It crowned mosques, cathedrals, capitols and exhibition halls in brick, stone, tile, iron and glass, thinned in the twentieth century to a concrete shell a few centimetres thick, and dissolved at last into a lattice of triangles. This complete history follows that single idea across three millennia, explains the thrust and counter-thrust that keep it standing, and teaches the reader to read any dome — its transition, its drum, its coffers, its light — at a glance.