International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2009 - Space/l'Espace
Abstract

Gothic architecture has a curiously ambiguous relationship to space.  On the one hand, Gothic buildings shape both interior and and exterior spaces in dramatic and compelling ways, often urging beholders to gaze upwards into high spaces that they might not explore in the absence of architectural cues.  On the other hand, though, space in the Gothic tradition was basically a by-product of the design process, rather than a conceptually privileged pre-existing quantity.  Gothic buildings emerged from an inherently non-spatial creative practice in which two-dimensional geometries and linear patterns played the leading role, as examination of surviving design drawings makes clear.  The overwhelming majority of these drawings come from the Germanic world, but several French drawings are still extant, including the famous Laon tower drawings from the portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt and a magnificent late Gothic façade drawing from Clermont-Ferrand.  Analysis of these drawings, and comparison with examples from Strasbourg and Prague, confirms that design strategies pioneered in France in the first century of the Gothic era retained their currency across an impressively wide geographical and chronological range.  In these French drawings, as in their eastern brethren, the play of dynamic geometry in the horizontal and vertical planes serves to establish both the proportions and the articulation of the architectural forms.  This Gothic approach to design, which endured in northern Europe until after 1500, differed fundamentally from the emergent Italian Renaissance approach, in which buildings were often conceived in terms of simple three-dimensional figures such as spheres and cubes.  It is the absence of this volumetric sense, in fact, that gives Gothic space its characteristic verticality and dynamism.