The reroofing of a group of Early Christian basilicas on the Karpas peninsula is the subject of The First Vaulted Churches in Cyprus. Charles Anthony Stewart argues that the barrel vaults, which replaced the wooden roofs of these churches, can be dated to the late seventh or early eighth century. Mustering all the evidence now available and placing these monuments in their historical context, he confirms the consensus about dating that was reached, but not fully argued, by investigating archaeologists in the 1970s, Andreas Dikigoropoulos, Athanasios Papageorghiou, and A. H. S. Megaw. When these churches were rebuilt in the seventh and eighth centuries, Cyprus was a neutral state divided between the Arab Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire. In this environment, builders experimented with methods to erect and support heavy vaulting while maintaining the traditional basilical form. Their designs foreshadowed the later development of Romanesque architecture in the West.The lively, decades-long scholarly debate about the length that Jacopo Sansovino originally planned for his Libreria di San Marco in Venice (begun 1537) is the subject of A Window in the Venetian Mint and the Libreria di San Marco. Did Sansovino intend the building to have seventeen bays, or the present twenty-one? The question is important, because the Libreria plays a crucial role in the city's famous central urban space, Piazza San Marco. Eugene J. Johnson brings new evidence to the discussion, having discovered inside the Libreria a walled-up window that once opened into the east wall of the Sansovino's contemporaneous Venetian Mint, or Zecca. The window offers an opportunity to reconsider the arguments, and Johnson concludes that Sansovino had envisioned the longer, twenty-one bay building from the outset.The pair of Gritti monuments in San Francesco della Vigna stand out among the large tombs of Venice for their lack of sarcophagi and of portraits of the deceased—indeed of any figure sculpture at all. The Gritti Monuments in San Francesco della Vigna, Venice: The Case for Palladio's Authorship is the first full account of the tombs, and in it Andrew Morrogh demonstrates that they should be attributed to Andrea Palladio and dated ca. 1569–75. Palladio was uniquely well equipped to deal with the problems posed by the commission, in which, with considerable originality, he made use of two rather ordinary features, the epitaph and the coat of arms, to create architecture of very high quality. Based on a close reading of the documentary and stylistic evidence, and on an awareness of the context in Venetian tomb design, the paper discusses the social and religious factors to which the tombs responded, as well as their attribution and dating.Thomas Leslie explains that the wind-induced collapse of the Tay Bridge in Scotland in 1879 illustrated the vulnerability of tall metal frames to lateral forces. Built Like Bridges: Iron, Steel, and Rivets in the Nineteenth-century Skyscraper recounts the revolution in structural methods that followed, culminating in the mid-1890s with the invention of the riveted all-steel skeleton frame and the elimination of thick masonry shear walls. The first generation of wind-braced skyscraper metal frames relied on bridgelike systems of cross bracing or shiplike systems of knee bracing, but these structures intruded into rentable spaces. The second generation of frames better exploited the material properties of steel, making stiff connections between girders and columns that, when multiplied throughout the building, could collectively resist lateral forces without such intrusions. Steel—which had replaced cast iron as a structural material by 1895—excelled in this role because it could be rolled into efficient, workable shapes and riveted to form tight connections.