Essentials of Gothic Architecture

In many ways, Gothic engineers were making what had seemed impossible the norm. On one hand, the solid stone walls had been stretched into arches at their bases and punctured by oculi, clerestories, and stained-glass windows virtually their entire length and breadth. At the same time, weight was being piled onto the ceiling vaults; the decorative vaulting only added even more weight to the gravity-defying cut-stone vaultwork. As many Medieval builders discovered, you could not eliminate most of the surface area of a supporting wall while at the same time constructing massively heavily loads above; the strain proved simply too much for the upper levels to bear, weakened as they were by the ubiquitous presence of stained glass (which we will get to shortly). So, a novel innovation appeared which becomes one of the hallmarks of the Gothic style: the flying buttress. These were exterior supports which had their base in the low, sturdy walls of the church’s side aisles and outer chapels, but they reached up to where they were most needed. The style of architecture which came to dominate the capitals of Medieval Europe was rooted in a new religious, philosophical, and even proto-scientific concept of the nature of light. For the first time, the stone walls of heavy Romanesque churches gave way to expanses of colored glass which bathed interiors in the sacred rays Medieval scholastic churchmen had been exploring. Hand in hand with the new appreciation of light came the prerogative to stretch sacred spaces as high as their engineering permitted - the higher the nave, the closer to God. These and other characteristics of the Gothic architectural style make up the content of this course.