Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

The use of classical columns and decorative detail has been so regularly revived in the history of Western architecture that they more or less define what Western architecture is, or was seen to be, until relatively recently. Even the main alternative tradition — the medieval architecture that we now call Gothic — grew out of an attempt to rival the Romans’ achievements in their monuments. The vaulted churches of northern Europe that were built from the 10th to the 12th century are called ‘Romanesque’, and they were inspired by the ruins of Roman gates and temples that lingered for example in Burgundy, where we find the first medieval vaulted church at Tournus. The meaning of medieval buildings has undergone the most extraordinary shift over the years. The most spectacular monuments of the Middle Ages are the great French cathedrals, such as Bourges, which were made so as to appear as if they were constructed out of little more than coloured light (Figure 8). Complex and ingenious arrangements of stone made all this possible, cut to shape with astonishing precision, and put into place by groups of skilled craftsmen who would travel round from one major cathedral to another, learning from their experience and improving on past performances. While the various elements of the Gothic style were around in Romanesque churches, it is usually seen to have crystallized in a new vision in the fabulously wealthy church of Saint-Denis near Paris, from about 1137, when the Abbot Suger began a programme of rebuilding. He described his rapture, surrounded by the church’s gem-encrusted treasures and coloured light: ‘I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven.’ Through the 13th to 15th centuries there were also pale imitations of the work in the smaller churches and more modest buildings.

The name ‘Gothic’ was first given to this architecture in the 17th century, as a term of abuse. The Goths, along with the Vandals and Huns, were the Germanic tribes who sacked Rome and laid waste to the western Roman empire in the 5th century. To call the architecture ‘Gothic’ is like calling it ‘barbaric’ — saying that it is a form of cultural vandalism. Needless to say, in this cultural climate the architecture was not approached with sympathy, and it was not closely analysed, but all non-classical styles of building were bundled together and thought of as a confused jumble of incoherence and bad taste. This sense of the Gothic survives when it is used in ‘Gothic horror’. Indeed the whole idea of the Middle Ages is caught up in this way of looking at things. It was supposed to have been a time between ancient and modern civilization (see page 6). Medieval architecture was studied first of all by antiquaries, who began to realize that there were various different styles of architecture here, and that they had been built at different times. The Gothic was then used in the 19th century by architects such as Pugin, who did the detailed work for the Palace of Westminster, but he preferred to call the style ‘pointed or Christian’ rather than Gothic, in an attempt to clear it of its unfavourable associations. For him, and architects like him, it came to represent a way of designing that was highly principled, and went well beyond being a pleasant decorative style, to being a moral and religious way of doing the right thing in architecture. For him Gothic architecture was not only the best, it was the only legitimate sort of architecture for a principled designer with Christian morals.