A brick dome in Virginia stands without internal support
Architecture
Thomas Jefferson utilized an ancient Roman trick to balance twelve hundred tons of masonry without a single central pillar to hold it up.
The Rotunda at the University of Virginia is a masterpiece of gravity-defying masonry. Built in the 1820s, its eighty-nine-foot dome spans a sixty-five-foot wide room using nothing but self-supporting brick vaulting. Jefferson modeled the structure after the Roman Pantheon, using a clever distribution of weight that pushes outward and downward into the thick walls rather than requiring vertical columns. This design allows the structure to support twelve hundred tons of brick through pure geometry.