 We're going to continue talking about Gothic architecture today. And Gothic architecture, as you can see from this map, has a strong concentration in France, around Paris, in the area called Ile-de-France. But it begins to spread quite rapidly throughout Europe. The little black dots represent Gothic sites. And you can see Canterbury, Salisbury, Cambridge, Oxford, some of the great university towns up in England. And we'll be spending some time today looking at English Gothic architecture. But Gothic also begins to spread into German countries and even into Italy a bit, although it doesn't have quite the same resonance in Italy. And that might have to do with the fact that the Italians feel very comfortable with classical architecture, what with being a Roman and all. It doesn't seem like a foreign style that's been imposed on them. But Gothic architecture, particularly in these northern lands, takes off like crazy. And if you think about the qualities of Gothic architecture that we looked at last time, qualities like this one in Notre Dame, there's something about the Gothic interior that looks a lot like a forest, that looks like trunks with branches twining overhead. It's speculation, but many people have speculated that the qualities of Gothic architecture might very well resemble the kind of forest grove where the pagan rituals of northern peoples would have been celebrated. So Gothic architecture has, as its origins, a different model based on a different climate and a different history than the model that sponsored classical architecture. Even the quality of light that comes through a Gothic church, the dappled light casting strange patterns is very much like the kind of light you might expect to find in a forest. When we talked about Gothic architecture, in the past, we looked at early examples like Saint-Denis and noticed that there was an attempt to be organized, an attempt to begin to find a way to structure a facade in such a way as to really clarify the position of all the pieces. Certain features were becoming normal, like the triple portal and the rose window and the twin towers on the west work, although Sunday didn't quite pull that one off. And by the time we get to Notre Dame in Paris, it almost looks like it's been perfected or it's been clarified with a kind of scholastic precision. And by scholastic precision, I'm referring to the School of Philosophy most eloquently discussed in the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas, where categorization and organization and correspondence between the heavens and earth are mapped out with mathematical precision. And you look at Notre Dame and you have to say, this is one heck of a facade. That's what I say every time I see it. And then I get an ice cream. And then I keep looking at it, but with an ice cream. And what features make Notre Dame so perfect? Or let's just say, what features in Notre Dame exemplify the Gothic in a way that even, say, Saint-Denis does not? Who would like to handle that? Yes. Good. She said, if you were to divide this facade into a nine-square grid, the rose window would take up pretty much the entire center. In fact, this facade is strongly governed by geometry. And it's strongly governed by structure. And there is this clarity, I think, that comes from conceptualizing the building as a mass from which the elaboration of ornament is carved out rather than added on. Just to remind you, Notre Dame is OK. Look at your thumb. Look at the plan. That's it. Already by the time we get to the high Gothic in churches like Rhin Cathedral, some of the rigor and restraint that we saw in Notre Dame is beginning to go away in favor of more free elaboration of the ornamental program. This is a drawing of an ideal church based on Rhin Cathedral by the 19th century architect and restorer Eugène Emmanuel Violet-le-Duc. And it just looks almost like a cloud of fluff, which in fact is what these churches look like with all their buttresses coming out and so forth. Monet was probably responding to the ambiguity of surface, the superabundance of ornament, and the frothy quality that made the building so receptive to light when he did his cycle of paintings of the Rhin Cathedral in the period from 1882 to 1883, I believe. He tried to capture the quality of light on the building and because they were so changeable and so variable based on the way light hit them and they cast shadows, he kept several canvases going at the same time and he ultimately painted about 30 canvases of the same subject. But it's a different look than we got from Notre Dame, which is chiseled and precise and readable. And it's true also that the facade of Rhin Cathedral is layered and lacy. One thing we identified when we looked at it last time is that the porch becomes autonomous. The porch is no longer carved into the mass of the building, but it pulls out from the mass of the building and becomes almost a screen that one moves through. So the three dimensionalization of the wrapper of the building, which is enforced by the necessity of pulling out buttresses on the sides, is now mirrored in the pulling out of the porch on the front. And so you get this incredibly diaphanous, lacy wrapper throughout. And ornament becomes slightly more focused on producing replications of itself at ever-refined scales than at encoding these very precise meanings or mapping out these very precise hierarchies that we saw in Notre Dame. This is the effect of all that diaphanousness, the introduction of lots more light. So as a point of comparison, just to show us how these things march along, here we have these are at real scale. And ultimately, Amiens is about 140 feet tall. Chartres is about 118 feet tall. And I don't remember how tall Notre Dame is, but slightly smaller. And you can see this kind of transformation from extreme clarity and order to something that becomes much, much more about an elaboration of surface. And that leads to the next development of Gothic that you have in France. And we glimpsed it a little bit last time when we looked at Saint-Chapelle. And that's the rayonnant, or flamboyant, Gothic. And the word flamboyant should tell you something very flamboyant is going on here. And it is. This is a little image of Saint-Marclot in Rouen. The name will be written out in a moment. But it is, I think, a really good description of how ornament becomes autonomous, how ornament begins to replicate itself in a way that's more sculptural than didactic. The map here shows you the spread of Gothic in the 13th and 14th centuries. That is to say, the period of the high Gothic and moving into this late period of Gothic. What we see as we move into this late period of Gothic is an increased interest in lightness and dematerialization and ever-increasing fragility and so forth. So here's Saint-Chapelle that we looked at before. And you can see from the plan of Saint-Chapelle that there is this extreme erosion of the envelope. Also, the buttresses that flank Saint-Chapelle begin to give it this kind of exterior view of cage. And Beauvais Cathedral, in its extreme dematerialization, likewise, begins to make propositions about architecture that aren't entirely rational and Thomas in their impulse. I don't know if I clarified this last time. This is the crypt of Saint-Chapelle when we looked at the section of Saint-Chapelle. We saw this little area down below and then the big chapel up above. And there's a wonderful juxtaposition between the spatial experience of the two conditions. This is really kind of cave-like and compact. And the way you enter it now is you come in through the crypt and then you explode up into this wonderful expansion of light and space. Originally, you wouldn't have entered it that way because it was a palace chapel. And it would have been directly adjacent to the palace. Here's Saint-Claude in Rouen that we looked at briefly in our initial slide. And I think you can see from this that it is wild because this is the main portal of the building. This is the facade that, in most cases, in most, let's say, early and high Gothic churches, would have this tripartite organization. But it would be along the plain of the facade. And now in Saint-Claude, the facade itself has bubbled out and become a kind of autonomous lumpy thing. So this is the facade that we're looking at over here. You find this tendency toward pattern making and toward the undermining of surface to be a continuing feature as Gothic moves forward and as Gothic expands out of France into other countries. So let's look at England. And you'll know immediately, and you can get a sense of this by looking at the little slide on the screen, that something very different is going on in English Gothic with respect to French Gothic. When we looked at French Gothic, the dominant condition, both of facades and of interior space, was amplifying the soaring vertical. And here, in Lincoln Cathedral and in many, many English cathedrals, there seems to be some kind of horizontal pole. There also seems to be some kind of variation in the ornamental program toward perpendicularity, let's say, toward this kind of nesting together of right angles. And some of the features that we would expect to find in a French Gothic cathedral just go away, like where's the rose window? Canterbury cathedral is a good example for a number of reasons. One reason is it started as a Romanesque church and was amplified over time. And so it has remnants of early in it. And you can look at the Canterbury cathedral plan and you can see this kind of transformation from one condition to another. So here's the little Romanesque church, which looks kind of like a cactus, if you wonder what it looks like. And as it expands, it's the craziest looking thing you've ever seen. It begins to grow another transept and kind of grow radial chapels, but in a very odd way. There was a architect from France that came over, William of Saint, who was involved in Saint Cathedral, an early Gothic cathedral that we looked at briefly when we were making comparisons with Durham Cathedral. So there is some direct input of a French sensibility into Canterbury cathedral, but weirdly hybrid. I just think this is the strangest looking church ever. To me, it looks like a little Cachina doll. If you've ever seen these little Navajo dolls with little arms and heads. When you look at this plan, which has a reflected ceiling plan showing you the different condition of vaulting, it really almost looks as though it's a jack in the box. This is some kind of little box and this new condition springs out and begins to materialize. Like many English Gothic churches, Canterbury is part of a larger complex, a larger monastic complex. So we have some features here that have to do with a monastic complex. This big courtyard, does anybody remember what those big monastic courtyards are called? Yes, well done, cloister. So here's a cloister, here's a refectory, a dining hall for the monks. This little round thing is a lady chapel or a kind of chapter house. When it says lady chapel, it doesn't mean that's where they party with the ladies, but that it's dedicated to the Virgin. Canterbury was an important pilgrimage church which gives rise to so many little chapels and so many little shrines. And one of the great pilgrimage shrines within the church is the place of Thomas Ibecket's martyrdom, where he was murdered in the cathedral. Like the French Gothic churches, English Gothic churches operate at a scale completely different from the scale of the cities around them, but the space, the interior space is much, much lower. There is less of a desire or less of a technical capacity for the extreme thinness and extreme verticality that we get in the French examples. Probably the best realized, let's say, most coherent of all the English Gothic churches is Salisbury. And one reason that Salisbury is so coherent is that it was built in a fairly short period of time and it does not have to accommodate so many different historical layers as Canterbury did. It's also geometrically incredibly clear. You look at the plan here and you begin to see this term perpendicular really making itself manifest with the square apps and the square radiating chapel and even square transeps multiplying and coming out as if it were some kind of grid or Gothic about to take over the world. And this is the plan showing you the monastic complex with the cloister and the lady chapel over here. By the way, for history buffs a copy of the Magna Carta is kept here. And for structures buffs when the church was originally designed it was not meant to have a crossing tower. Remember the crossing is where the transept and the nave come together. And so since it wasn't meant to have a crossing tower there it wasn't quite enough structure in there. And when they put the crossing tower up they had to add buttressing to one side but the other side was fine. So on one hand it seems to be highly idealized and on another hand it does have this kind of eccentric modification that throws things out of whack. Let's look for a moment at the facade of Cathedral because it is really nuts compared to the samples that we've been looking at. What's it missing or what seems weirdly truncated? Do you have any reading on this? Yes. Yeah, it's like a lobster that you've removed the claws from and it's growing these like little baby claws. It's kind of a lobster but not quite. And the rose window is entirely gone. I mean it seems like there's a totally different sensibility that goes into making this facade. And it seems to be much less about the explicit demonstration of structure and this gritting out of the facade. And rather there's just a kind of sensibility of covering the whole thing over with pattern. Because every little surface is encrusted with all kinds of pattern. This is what you get. This is called the W window for some reason. I guess because W instead of a rose window that we hear. Slender little colonettes marking out the surface. And here's the entry portal. It all looks so thin and so spindly, doesn't it? Compared to the French Gothic. And that's so strange because the French Gothic looks so thin and so spindly compared to the Romanesque. But this stuff looks paper thin to me. A lot of the stuff that we saw going on in the flamboyant and reina late Gothic in France had to do with the weird developments in vaulting. This kind of autonomy, the tracery begins to detach itself from the wall and do its own thing. And that is something that finds real favor in England. Here in Salisbury in the church proper you don't see it so much. But if you go into the little lady chapel that place with the Magna Carta, there is a fan vault. And the fan vault simply, well it looks like a mushroom almost where the ribs come together to pull down. This is what the vaulting looks like in the rest of the church. It's kind of rational. It's kind of four part vaulting. As we look at later and later and later English cathedrals, this tendency of the vaulting to go crazy becomes more and more pronounced. So much so that at Lincoln Cathedral there's a section of vaulting that is widely known as crazy vaulting. That's not my term, crazy vaulting. And you will see why. Anyhow, here's Lincoln Cathedral. If people showed you this on a test say and you had to identify it, how would you be able to know that it was English Gothic? What things about the plan of Lincoln Cathedral tell you that this has got to be English Gothic? Yes. Well you could have a double transept in French Gothic but it's more likely to happen in English Gothic. So yeah. Yes. Yes. I don't know people's names. White sweatshirt girl with glasses. The cloister you could have at any monastic compound but you're awfully likely to have one with a Gothic church in England, yes? Right, in early Christian and Romanesque and in French Gothic you traditionally have a rounded apps and here what do we have? Right, it's straight. Somebody else had their hand up or did she steal your answer? Yes. Well there are. There are perpendicular angles throughout the transept. This whole thing seems to be governed by a highly organized disposition of orthogonal lines, of right angles. And you get this kind of very dramatic lady chapel. And I would say that the lady chapel in this form is something you find a lot more frequently in a English Gothic than in a French or Italian or whatever else Gothic. Here's the facade of Lincoln Cathedral. What is so crazy looking? What makes this thing look like it's English to you? If you saw this and you had to say is it English or French, yes? It reads very horizontally as well as vertically, right? I mean it almost looks like it's some kind of biology experiment that you did in ninth grade where you had to collect insects and pin their wings down. Did you do that? Or did you go to school in a kinder, gentler era than I did? When you were no longer pinning bugs to corkboard. So doesn't it look like you pin this thing down and here it is, you flatten it out? It's a strange looking thing. It looks almost hybrid. The plasticity of these towers seems dissonant with the flatness of the facade in front. What else makes it look like it's probably not going to be French Gothic? Yes. Yeah, the main portal is incredibly large that there's an entirely different strategy in organizing the facades in the English Gothic than in the French Gothic. The French Gothic is very much that nine square grid that one of your classmates identified when looking at Notre Dame. And here, not so much. Here it's these kind of horizontal bands with these large figures popping through. Good. Here's the massing of Lincoln Cathedral. And here's a little sneak peek at the thing called crazy vaulting. Can you get why it's crazy vaulting? It's so weird. It's sort of asymmetrical. It does the trick, which is to say it takes loads from the roof and translates them to points, but it doesn't unfold symmetrically. It kind of oscillates from point to point as you move along the surface. There's another view of the fabulousness of Lincoln Cathedral and a diagram of the crazy vaults, different strategies of crazy vaults. Some of the vaults do this, which are a little bit more normative, let's say, than the crazy vaults because they're symmetrical. But they're beginning to create a situation that is more fan-like. That's more about the kind of volumetrics produced in a convex way than the concavity that you get of a rib vault that follows the geometry of the church. Here are the crazy vaults where you get this kind of zigzagging from point to point to point. And here are some of your crazy vaults. The Henry Chapel, which is quite late at Westminster Abbey is an example of a church where the vaulting is becoming more and more sculptural, more and more autonomous, less and less about simply reinforcing the line of structure on the plane of the ceiling vault and more and more about becoming this kind of free figure. This diagram shows you what's happening, that these vaults become these hollow cones almost hanging in the space. And you see what I mean. The notion that Gothic architecture is about the clear representation of structure and lines of force through a building just is not happening anymore. The entire surface has been encrusted with this waffle-like pattern making. And even things that begin to suggest the formation of structure don't quite hit the ground. They hang there like stalactites in space. So if one of the roles of Gothic architecture is to freak you out, to kind of dazzle you with the miracle that the ceiling is being held up at all, I can imagine that the experience of going into the Henry Chapel in medieval times would have been really shocking where you think, well, I'm coming back when those columns have had a chance to grow and reach the ground because it just looks too, too fragile. This is Ely Cathedral, another one of these big, hulking, perpendicular-style Gothic cathedrals. Fabulous massing. The idea of the tower at the crossing is something that becomes a feature in English Gothic churches. This aerial view shows you that not only one, but two crossing towers are going on here because, of course, we have not only one, but two transeps. And here's the facade. Honestly, these are such crazy-looking facades, aren't they? If you're used to looking at the French Gothic facades, it's as though children have been drawing facades and they forgot what the ordering principles were or that there's a completely different set of aspirations at play and a completely different kind of local taste favoring the horizontal rather than the vertical, but somehow finding a way to reconcile the two tastes together. And here's the plan of Ely. Quite a little rational plan. And the moment where Ely goes really crazy and becomes expressive of this kind of new, free sensibility of structure and ornament is at the crossing. Expressive of this new, free sensibility of structure and ornament is at the crossing. And looking down the nave, you can begin to see these fan vaults welling up and supporting an octagonal tower at the crossing. This is the crossing at Ely. The erected ceiling plan shows you a bit of what's going on with those vaults. The structure at the crossing is a little bit different here than the structure at the crossing we've seen in other churches. Typically, we see four piers supporting the crossing so that if there's a vault at the crossing, it comes down to four piers. But the transept comes marching in with two hulking big pieces of structure. The nave comes marching in with two hulking big structures. And the choir comes marching in with two hulking big chunks of structure. So you actually have eight piers disposed around the center which makes it possible to get this unusual figure in the vaulting that we see here at Ely. So pretty and so different from what we see in France. I'm gonna show you one more English example and this is King's College in Cambridge. Look at the date, 1516. By 1516, we were almost at mannerism in Italy. The Italian Renaissance had been going strong for almost a hundred years but styles do not hit every part of Europe at exactly the same point in time. So while Italy was going through the Renaissance, English Gothic was going through its latest and its most sort of ornamental period as demonstrated at King's College Chapel. The wall, I guess you could say that King's College Chapel is to English Gothic where Saint-Chapelle is to French Gothic. It's a fairly small church. It's a church for Cambridge University and it is lantern-like. The walls are almost completely gone. It has this amazing glazing but it also has amazing vaulting which Saint-Chapelle does not. But here, these are really kind of dramatic fan vaults coming out, mushrooming out from the side, lacing together and allowing the plasticity of the ceiling to play against the luminosity of the wall. And the plan is incredibly straightforward. The plan is like this little bowling alley of a plan and that would be one heck of a bowling alley, quite frankly. I would become a pro bowler if I had the opportunity to bowl there. A long tube of space crisscrossed by buttresses and then just diaphanous on the interior. I want to talk a little bit about Central European Gothic because we mentioned at the beginning of this class that Gothic was spreading in all directions and particularly in places like Germany, Poland, Bohemia, places that were forested northern lands. Gothic was very, very eagerly received and eagerly expanded upon. Additionally, you did have this traveling class of masons who would go from building project to building project to building project. So frequently, a project that you might see in Germany would have had French masons working on it, just as we had William of Saint go and work Canterbury in England. Albrecht's Borg in Mison is an example of a Gothic domestic space. It's a palace, a near Dresden in Germany. And I think this is just spectacular. This is quite late, once again, 1470. Renaissance is going strong in Italy. But something that I really like about this is how the tracery, which was already showing signs of having a life of its own back in the English and Ray-Anon French examples that we looked at, now really does peel away from the wall. It peels off the wall and becomes the balustrade for a winding staircase, doing its own thing. Or here, in this hall, the crazy concave convex pattern-making of the vaults express themselves as some kind of surface you would be happy to show on a studio project if you could figure out how to model it. And they were able to model it using really primitive tools. This is another fabulous little piece of German stuff, the Freiburg Cathedral in Saxony. I don't know. Who thinks this is beautiful? All right, that's good. I think it's sort of beautiful in a kind of frightening way. It's like little garden dwarfs on steroids climbing up a Gothic stairway. Things that are interesting about it, I think, are revealed to a large extent by this drawing, which is a 18th century drawing next to it, that shows explicitly this reference to the forest, this reference to the forest glade with the branches that twine together and give you a kind of architecture. And you see that in these little branchy things that the little garden dwarfs are climbing up. You also see this extreme dematerialization taken to the spindly stair. It's kind of the same structural detail that Mies van der Rohe is to use many years later out of steel, where you simply have something underneath these freestanding treads that make them seem to float in space. But here, take into a crazy, descriptively vulgar level. Or here's Braunschweig Cathedral. And these German examples you're not going to be tested on, I just want to show you the degree to which the style permutates. Everybody's smiling now. Permutates and varies as you move from country to country. Like, look what's happening here. I think this is so beautiful. It's beautiful because it, I think, really exemplifies this whole metaphor of the forest or vines twining down as they come down from the ceiling and the liveliness and the variability of the forms. And here's another one. This one's quite famous, the Anna Berg in St. Anna, where things kind of like fan vaulting happens. But the thing that's kind of like fan vaulting begins to create these littler nodes of baby vaulting so that the whole surface of the ceiling becomes highly animated and highly patterned. These are construction details showing you, if you want to make one of these at home, this is what you do. And part of it is the express play of the patterned ribs and then the freeing of the ribs from the surface of the building and knotting them together. This is the kind of stuff that we have going on in the Anna Berg. Where the twisted piers, we call trees, and the form of the building itself become sort of tree-like in the elaboration of the transept as another one of these little lumpy things. The basic point here is that as we move in northern Europe and in central Europe and in England into the late Gothic, there is an increased interest in the elaboration of pattern, the elaboration of surface, and the autonomy of ornament.