Life in a Medieval City by Frances; Joseph Gies

Author:Frances; Joseph Gies
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-03-04T06:56:23+00:00

Medieval machinery, sketched by Vil ard de Honnecourt: top, mechanical saw for splitting beams; upper right, crossbow with sighting device; middle, hoisting machines; lower left, a mechanical eagle.

When medieval engineers found another way to mount a vault on piers they opened the door to Gothic architecture.6

The Romans, acquainted with the pointed arch, found as little use for it as had the Greeks or Persians. It was French engineers of the twelfth century who made the discovery that two pointed arches, intersecting overhead at right angles, created an exceptional y strong stone skeleton, which could rest solidly on four piers. The stones were easy to cut and the spaces between could be fil ed with no exceptional skil on the part of the mason. And once mounted on its piers, the new vault could be raised to astonishing heights at moderate cost. The higher the vault, the more room for windows, and the better il uminated the church. A problem remained. As the vault rose, the piers required reinforcement to contain the thrust from the ribs, which threatened to topple them outward.

At first this difficulty was met by buttressing, that is, by giving an extra thickness to the exterior wal at the point where the rib connected. But this made it impossible to put side aisles in the church. The spectacular answer to the problem was the flying buttress, a beam of masonry that arched airily over the low roof of the side aisle to meet the point where the rib supporting the main vault connected with the top of the pier.

By 1250 the intricate combination of piers, ribs, and flying buttresses has become an established, functioning system, one which would have opened the eyes of Roman engineers.

Medieval builders have a better theoretical grasp of structural relationships than had their Roman predecessors, who often used unnecessarily heavy underpinnings. But there is stil no such thing as theoretical calculation of stress, or even accurate measurement.

Gothic churches are ful of smal errors of alignment, and sometimes a vault crashes. But with or without a grounding in theory, the new technology usual y works, and works so wel that though original y conceived in a spirit of economy, it has had a history similar to that of many other engineering advances. It has opened such social and aesthetic possibilities that in the end it has raised the cost of church construction. A hundred years ago the nave of one of the first Gothic cathedrals, at Noyon, soared to a height of eighty-five feet. Notre-Dame-de-Paris then rose to a hundred and fifteen feet, Reims to a hundred and twenty-five, Amiens to a hundred and forty, and Beauvais, just started, is aiming at over a hundred and fifty. Spires above the bel towers reach much higher, that of Rouen ultimately holding the championship at four hundred and ninety-five feet, higher than the Great Pyramid.

It is no accident that the development of Gothic architecture coincides with growing affluence. The bishop of Troyes could not have undertaken the new Cathedral of St.

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