The Gothic Cathedral - The architecture of the Great Church

Christopher Wilson

Thames & Hudson

1990

304 páginas

10h 8m

ISBN-13: 9780500276815

The Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages are among the world's supreme architectural achievements. Hundreds of great churches were built between c.1130 and c.1530, all of them representing an investment of money and effort so immense that it is difficult to find a modern parallel. Their archietecture ranges through a whole spectrum of styles, including meticulously articulated French Early Gothic, brittle glass-walled Rayonnant, eclectic and densely inventive English Decorated, jarggedly fantastical German late Gothic,and blandly decorous Tusscan.
The Gothic Cathedral focuses in the interacction between desing and the requirements of patrons, following the creative processes of archietects by reconstructing the problems and opportunities which faced them. Christopher Wilson presents the assential facts on such aspects as chronology, structural techiniques and stylistic developments; and then goes further, seeing the story as a sequence of choices from which new solutions arose, which, in their turn, gave rise to still more challenges.
Ilustrated with carefully chosen photographs and specially drawn diagrams, this fresh, perceptive and provocative book has already established itserlf as a definitive introduction to the subject. For this paperback edition, the author has incorporated the results of the most recent research and added new bibliographical material.
With 221 illustrations.