On Structural Bases for Building the Mexican Convent Churches From the Sixteenth Century

This study was intended to find out about the extent in which the sixteenth century Mexican convent builders followed certain patterns or rules in determining the structural elements dimensions and arrangement for their convent churches, specifically the walls and buttresses to counteract the vaults' thrust. The study aimed to know if the structural rules stated in the building treatises from that period have a rational foundation and if they were used in these buildings. For this purpose, a parametric study was performed on a nave model covered by the most typical types of vault found in these churches. This rules' validation was based on comparing the load capacity for gravitational loads determined by the non-linear analysis of finite element models. Through this same type of analysis, safety levels of a set of convent churches were evaluated. Reliability of adopted analytical tools and applicability of other techniques currently available for the analysis of this type of structure are briefly discussed. It was found that ratios among some basic dimensions of the structural members were kept rather similar despite of differences in size and other characteristics of the churches; and that some dimensions, as the buttress depth, are consistently close to those determined by some of the historical rules. In another regard, most historical rules do not lead to consistent safety factors regarding structural capacity for resisting the self weight of the vault.