Friday, November 25, 2011

Gothic Architecture and St. Denise

In Gothic architecture, with a romanesque style but a lot heavier, ribbed vault and pointed arch are the most commonly used during that time. Vaults were used to transfer the roof's load and passes down to colonnades which at last sends directly to the ground. One of the reasons why vaults were used a lot in Gothic style is because of the idea of minimizing number of columns as much as possible in the interior which required enough vaults to help transferring load through flying buttress instead of directly pass to straight columns. Moreover, Gothic architecture involved a lot of natural light use through windows and tracery on the second gallery.

The Abbey church of Saint Denis was one of the structures introduced with pointed arch rib vault and a significant use of light.


Within Gothic architecture, light plays an important and better role comparing to Romanesque period. By the use of flying buttresses, they allow more light to penetrate inside the space because columns, that are blocking the space, are hardly find.


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