Let's get stone
How medieval Gothic architecture
Within 150 years, the architectural landscape of medieval Europe had changed. If at the start of the 12th century, all stone buildings in Europe were being built in a style we now call Romanesque (or ‘Norman’ in England), by the 1250s, that style had fallen out of fashion, being replaced everywhere, from Spain to Hungary and from Norway to Sicily, by another style we still call ‘Gothic’.
The Gothic style was born in St Denis outside Paris, but its inspiration going back to Muslim Spain, in particular the Mudéjar tradition—Christian buildings incorporating Andalusi decorative elements.
If Romanesque churches - and their secular counterparts - had relied on thick walls and barrel vaults to support their weight, resulting in dim interiors, Gothic buildings, on the other hand achieved verticality and luminosity through ribbed vaults, flying buttresses and large windows.
The transition from Romanesque to Gothic architecture was driven by solutions to a central engineering problem: how to build taller, lighter structures without compromising structural integrity. But the idea of building in such a way did not come to the mind as a self-evident truth.
The renovation of the abbey church of Saint-Denis which kickstarted in 1135 under Abbot Suger is widely hailed as Gothic’s inaugural moment. By integrating ribbed vaults, pointed arches, and a stained-glass-clad chevet, Suger created a radiant space that became a template for northern French cathedrals.
The experiments were driven by a vision. In his treatise De Consecratione, Suger framed his architectural experiments as acts of devotion, arguing that opulent materials could elevate worshippers’ minds to the divine. In his other book De Administratione, he described Saint-Denis’s renovation as a quest to materialise divine light through stained glass, declaring, “The dull mind rises to truth through material things”. This Neoplatonic metaphysics of light—equating luminosity with spiritual enlightenment and anagogic ascent—explains the desire for verticality in Gothic design.
We don’t know how the main features of the new style came to Suger or to people close to him. There was no grand scheme of birthing a new design. Suger’s vision was innovative, but the engineering challenges had to be defined and then met one by one.
The medieval period did not produce a treatise of Gothic architecture in the same way that Vitruvius’ De Architectura theorised ancient Roman architecture. No Gothic blueprints survive for any building (though there are some interesting contemporary drawings of outstanding churches, albeit of little engineering value).
Instead, the only ‘documentary’ sources for the new style are the building themselves. And here, there are a few insights:
The new style spread like wildfire throughout Europe. If the 12th century was transitioning out of Romanesque, by the late 13th century, no new buildings were designed in the Romanesque style. The rate of adoption should make us think twice about the medieval appetite for innovation and problem-solving.
Because no architectural theoretical works survive, and arguably none were ever produced, the new style had to develop through trial and error. Indeed, we know of a number of churches which collapsed due to design errors. In 1284, the walls of Beauvais Cathedral collapsed, taking ‘the great vaults of the choir, several exterior pillars and the great windows’ down with them. Maybe it was the pursuit of extreme verticality and large light apertures conflicting with the structural limitations of stone masonry, or inadequate flying buttress systems that failed to counteract horizontal forces, or just columns that were too slender or too weak.
Yet, the existence and resilience of so many Gothic cathedrals and churches today shows that lessons were learned.
Finally, the Gothic was open-source. Despite or precisely because of lacking formal architectural treatises, master builders formed decentralized communities of practice, exchanging innovations through guilds, apprenticeships, and direct observation of successful structures. This “open-source” approach to architectural development as well as a more mobile professional population, allowed solutions to complex engineering problems to spread rapidly across regions, creating a pan-European architectural language that transcended political boundaries, though every region devoloped its own version and Gothic flavour.
By the time the Renaissance historian Giorgio Vasari wrote his Lives of the Artists in 1550, the style he derogatively described as ‘barbarous German style’ (what by the 19th century was known as Gothic) had been in full swing everywhere across Europe. What would replace it, at a similar pace that it had dislodged the Romanesque style, but not without pushback, would be a style inspired by the classical past and driven by science - a different vision from Suger’s altogether.