The Challenge of a Designer and his confidence in Masonry: the Case of a 19th Century Italian High Dome
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper tells the story of the designer Alessandro Antonelli and of his determination (1798-1888) to create a majestic construction above the cross vault of St. Gaudenzio Basilica built in 16th century in Novara, Italy: a 121 m (397 ft) high dome made entirely in masonry. Construction of the dome began in 1844, and as it progressed, it was interrupted several times and the project continued to evolve, increasing more and more in height, until it reached its current configuration in 1878, which features 5 domes stacked on top of each other. \nIn the following years the church began to show signs of structural failure, and Antonelli worked on the old foundations and pillars, which he judged to have been made of poor materials, because he firmly believed in the correctness of his design. Because of its size, the population often feared a possible collapse \nof the dome, until small signs at the top, observed in 1930 under the gilded, hollow statue placed at the summit, gave rise to a series of interventions to replace stone and masonry elements with concrete ones. \nThese interventions, carried out by a distinguished professor of the Politecnico di Milano (Eng. Arturo Danusso), reassured the citizens, but at the same time, they turned out to be responsible for a series of chain reactions that required continuous subsequent modern interventions on the masonry dome. In the early 21st century the last interventions were carried on: they were certainly very cutting-edge when implemented, but they unfortunately proved to be based on a lack of real understanding of the masonry structure. \nIt is intended here to retrace the history and the current description of this daring masonry construction, more interesting when seen from the inside than from outside, still little investigated, but which became the symbol of a city and the determination of its designer.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".