The great success of the Italian merchants stimulated the rest of Europe with new possibilities for cultural exhange so markets began to thrive in the cities, and the demand for public space and new cathedrals followed. Great market cities such as Bruges, Paris, Lübeck, and Cologne more than doubled in size by 1300.
In France the shared interests of the monarchy and the clergy encouraged the new Gothic style as both a cultural and a national enterprise. In cotrast to the heavy barrel vaults of Romanesque churches, the Gothic cathedral designers explored a structural system that combined pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and flying buttresses to achieve dazzing heights and mysterious luminosity. Traveling masons helped spread the style from France throughout Europe, leading the local interpretations wherever it appeared, to the point that the English, Germans, Spanish, Polish and Czechs considered Gothic their own.
The city Returns: Market Towns and New Towns
The new prosperity of the cities encouraged the expansion of the city walls, gigantic cathedrals, and impressive civic buildings; such as town halls, covered markets and hospitals. The quest for emancipation from feudal bonds inspired the foundation of hundreds of new towns across Europe, most built on orthogonal plans that revived the idea of public space. Seasonal markets rotated among the four Champagne towns in two-months durations throughout the year.
The Champagne fairs took place outside the city gates, where they generated permanent settlement areas known in French as ‘faubourgs’. The walls surrounding the city of Troyes doubled in 1250, they enclosed the western faubourg. In the western side, the streets took the names of the goods sold and the money changed. And the faubourg included a synagogue, a building for crusaders and two hospitals.
The growing economy of Troyes led to build a cathedral, a new church of St. Urbain, and a new hospital. St. Urbaing finished in thirty years.
The merchants of Bruges gained the right to own their houses and lands. This led to the formation of guilds and citizen councils. By the end of the thirteenth century, Bruges had rebuilt its walls as a gigantic oval enclosing the two earlier rings and improved its canal system. Also constructed several significent civic monuments including the Belfry, the Cloth Hall and the Waterhalle.
As the citizens of older towns struggled to gain new liberties, new towns were founded throughout Europe. The Zahringer counts, lords of parts of southern Germany and Switzerland, initated the conseptof the new town as an enterprise. Between 1119 and 1228 they sponsored a dozen market towns, each structured on a broad central street. The most successful of these, Freiburg-im-Breisgau and Berne, developed into important trade centers.
During the 14th and 15th centuries the town counsil permitted property owners to add deep arcades to the front of their buildings, single arches propped up on thick piers. The Zahringer planners didnt leave specific sites for cathedrals and town halls, but once a city had proven itself as successful market, the citizens found sites in secondary positions on the side streets for the religiouus and institutional buildings.
The French king Louis IX led the Seventh Crusade against Islam. He also conducted a champaign against renegade Christians. His armies destroyed lots of places and the king took one of the prime rebel forts, Carcassonne, and rebuilt it. Near the fortress of Carcassonne, the king established a polygonal new town with a grid settlement. One square in the center left unbuilt for the cities market.
During the late thirteenth century the French and English both claimed Gascony and built hundreds of bastides (new towns) to intensify their respective power over southwest France. They both followed a simple grid plan. Surveyors subdivided the blocks into oblong ‘gothic lots’. And they forced each settler to built a house within a year and participate in the expenses of preparing the streets, walls and market place. The designers calculated their spaces using proportional divisions. They allotted much more attention to public space by creating an oblong central piazza.
The Gothic Cathedral: The Crown of the City
The new gothic style appeared in European cities during the 13th and 14th century. The designers experimented with slender structural members to accentuate verticality, their aim was to create ‘heavenly’ interior light. The master builders have used that three structural expedients; pointed arches, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses. While none of the three was a new invention, together they comprised an architectural theory that served symbolic potantial of light.
Gothic architecture started with Abbot Suger. He wrote down his thoughts about rebuilding the abbey church of St. Denis. The interior of the church, with it’s spindy members and stained glass windows, would become the means to achieve a new light, the lux nova, as the transcendent metaphor for Christ.
Suger began with rebuilding of the façade, he inserted an oculus between the two towers. The drive to eliminate the mass from the walls came during the next decade with Suger’s rebuilding of the choir of St. Denis. Here he achieved the crystalline formation of double ambulatory opened through the radial alignment of its piers and columns to a chevet with seven chapels. Luminous but not bright, since the thick panes of stained glass shone only under direct sunlight, the chevet modulated a hushed, chromatic glow.
By the end of the century, lots of large cathedrals were underway in Gothic style, borders extended as the state absorbed new territories. France’s territories tripled during the 13th century, and the Gothic style accompanied this expansion to cities such as Amiens, Troyes and Rouen.
The designers of Notre-Dame consolidated Suger’s disparate concepts to a comprehensive architectonic system. The rebuilding of the church began in the mid-12th century, after a conflict resulted and partial destruction of the church. The cathedral, finished in 1215 provided a symbol of cohesion for the once-divided city. The piers alternated bundles of five shats corresponding to the ribs at the primary arches, with three shafts at the minor arches between each bay. The ribbed vaults, supported by external flying buttresses, rose between large voided areas for the tall clerestory windows that brought abundant daylight into the tribunes and the nave.
The cathedral at Chartres, began as a smaller church that was rebuilt and expanded after devastating a fire. The cities prized relic and the tunic of the Virgin Mary miraculously withstood the flames, and this increased the cathedrals strong attraction for pilgrims.
Verticality became a theological imperative for the gothic cathedral builders. They have builded very high naves, they heightened the ceilings with arches and ribbed vaults. And the big, wheel windows was a symbol of patronage as seen in Chartres wheel window. The cathedral grew as a symbol of the city’s prosperity and served as much as a community center as a fall of faith, used for town meetings, law courts, and theatrical events.
During the 13th century, Louis IX reopened work at St. Denis, under the direction of his favored architects; Jean de Chelles and Pierre de Montreuil. The resulting structures, which reduced the walls to shockingly thin skeletons of stone. That style named ‘rayonnant’ during the 19th century. The exterior walls dissolved into lacey stone tracery strung between the scaffold-like structure of interior piers and exterior flying buttresses.
In Paris the same architects designed the Ste-Chapelle for Louis IX, as a reliquary. Begun in 1240. In the upper chapel the designers attempted to reduce the mass of the walls to leave an ethereal curtain of stained glass. They enhanced the structure of the thin piers with concealed iron tension rods. They painted the groin vaults with a deep blue field of stars, gilded the ribs and tinted all of the exposed surfaces with patterns blending with the tones of the stained glass.
Chelles and Montreuil also redesigned the transept of Notre-Dame of Paris. Work begun around 12th century, resumed by Louis IX’s architects in the 13th century to enlarge the windows, creating a similar effect of rayonnant. Their work on the western facade appeared singularly harmonious.
Like the temples of Khmer, the great Gothic cathedrals doubled as marvels of engineering and immense piles of sculpture. Statues were tucked into the niches, cut into the columns and pitched on the roofs. The pyramidal pinnacles piled on the tops of the buttresses of Notre-Dame sprouted crockets above the level of the flyers. The pinnacles once thought to be pure decoration, served as counterweights to the thrust of the flyers. Gargoyles, sculpted on the downspouts, stuck out as fetish elements animating the upper ranges of the cathedrals. As diabolical figures, they haunted the house of God the way sins disturb human consciousness.
The spread of Gothic : lnternational yet Local
The first few bays of the pavement in the nave of Chartres Cathedral contained a labyrinth. In its center were portraits of the master builders who designed the structure. William of Sens, worked on the Gothic cathedral of Sens, gave him excellent qualifications, and the chevet he added to the new choir of the English church showed his preference for French precedents. He was deeply involved in the building process as master mason, structural engineer and building contractor.
Outside of France, people often referred to Gothic style as opus francigenum, thus associating it with French nation building but Gothic soon shook off associations with French to become English, German, Dutch, Spanish, Czech, Portuguese and Italian.
Ribbed vaults had appeared very early at Durham and took on astounding combinations at Lincoln Cathedral, contemporary with the construction of Chartres. The vaults over St Hugh’s choir looked in plan like adjacent Y figures, one inverted, leaving a rhomboid gap between them. A generation later , in the nave of Lincoln Cathedral, the masons created vaults with a profusion of radiating ribs , anticipating the fan vaults of later centuries.
One of the most common structural failures in English cathedrals involved the collapse of the central tower over the crossing. This occured at both Lincoln and Ely cathedrals. The designers at Wells, inserted huge scissor arches at the intersection of the crossing in the 1330s. These curving X shaped forms dramatically interrupted the flow of the nave, adding tangible support to the base of the spire.
Gothic style appeared in Germany through both the arrival of French masons and the preferences of elite patronage. Although the tower of Cologne remained incomplete until the 19th century, their design of open-web steeples directly inspired copies at the Spanish church.
Italy, which resisted Gothic style in favor of its strong Roman heritage, hosted new versions of ribbed vaults and pointed arches. Gothic became the preferred style of the Dominican order, which built grand churches such as SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice.
Parler and his descendents pursued a clear style and signed their works with a family emblem, a stylized hook. His son Peter worked with him on projects. And there was another member of the Parler clan, Michael, and his son Heinrich which worked on Strasbourg Cathedral in the 1360s.
Cohorts of experienced builders, under the patronage of knowledgeable clients, added their interpretations. Gothic became an agreed upon language of design that through the variety of regional situations developed into numerous local dialects.
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