architecture

It’s alive!

  • Reading time:2 mins read

So I’m reading about Gothic architecture — and for all its ornamentation, it actually is pretty logical in its development.

The main ingredient in all Gothic architecture is the pointed arch — a construction that, besides its visual appeal, has some practical aspects in that it allows for a bunch more weight than would normally be bearable, by directing much of the above force outward to its vertical elements. This allows for the very tall, narrow, usually rectangular open spaces typical of Gothic structures. Of course, since the walls are bearing so much weight, chopping such great holes in them for the giant windows typical of the period (and indeed necessary to light such massive structures) — pointed-arch windowframes or not — requires extra support, to keep the structures from crumpling. Thus, the flying buttress — those weird sinewy diagonal bits that you often see outside great Gothic halls, propping them up from the outside.

To keep the buttresses tied up, and weigh down the end that isn’t directly supporting something, they are often capped with a pinnacle — thus all the weird pointy peaks, to accentuate the pointy arches (and therefore pointy roofs) and the sinewy buttresses and the huge windows. The odd, skeletal, sort of grim feeling that this architecture gives off is mostly a side effect of an organic sequence of ideas, that all work together to form a solid, workable structure of a certain interior dimension within certain real estate limitations.

As for Neo-Gothicism… well, that was just the Romantics being all breathless and sentimental. As a result, it’s not always so practical.

Sagrada Lechuga

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Wak? Apparently a Gaudi design was in the competition for the WTC block on lower Manhattan. It didn’t get too far. But how interesting that would have been!

Gaudi is the architect of the Sagrada Familia cathedreal in Barcelona (which is still being constructed today, over a hundred years later), and is one of the central figures of the Spanish art noveau movement.

The Spanish barb of the art noveau style is distinctly different from what one might find elsewhere. It’s darker, drippier, pointier, more macabre. The Sagrada Familia is typical, if a little exaggerated, in its alien submarinalosity.

If any huge building is gonna’ have to be constructed there, then it might as well add something interesting to the city.

Manhattan already has (if I remember) the largest Gothic cathedreal in the world. (This is also still under construction.) But it’s farther uptown, in the Central Park area. I think the island could stand a little more creepiness. (It’s already got enough catacombs to bury any conceivable horror.)