The traditional sacral wooden construction in lithuania between XVIII and XIX century

Abstract

Lithuania is situated in a highly forested Northeastern Europe area and has a great variety of wooden buildings. Among the wooden structures we can enumerate the religious buildings, rich of historic values, presenting different forms and sizes and also a complex design and stratified construction phases. The oldest wooden churches began to built in Lithuania in the 13th century. Currently there are more than 500 existing wooden sacral structures, which not yet have detailed studies about their constructive and structural aspects. The main objectives of the research: • Knowledge of the rituals, related to the building types and stylistics and architectural solutions which were adapted to the Lithuanian sacred architecture; • systematization of the all sacred wooden buildings of Lithuania, with a particular attention to a detailed study of the more significant examples; • systematization of the building types and design of an atlas of construction techniques, useful to the future recovery and preservation of the timber structures; • schedules of the technological solutions, implementation of analyzed wooden buildings, related to the damage mechanisms and detected failures; • architectural and construction terms glossary. The research project proceeds - according to the direct knowledge of the building and through the analysis of the actual state of places and buildings - to define a geometric - dimensional and constructive survey, the analysis of the constitutive geometries, the history of construction techniques, the analysis of the main failures and degradations, the retrieval of the literature of the churches and their construction techniques.