Lectures on the rise and development of medieval architecture; vol. 1Scott, George Gilbert, Sir
History
Lectures on the rise and development of medieval architecture; vol. 1
Scott, George Gilbert, Sir
Architecture, Gothic; Architecture, Medieval
You first, after setting out your widths as in the original, increase
the whole height and that of each storey by one-third; you then increase
the pillars and the jambs of the triforium and clerestory windows in the
same proportion: this brings you to a stand, for the arches, being
semicircles, are invariable. Either you must leave them unaltered and
throw all the extra height into the wall above them, or you must stilt
them each to the extent of one-third of their height unless you can make
use of an elastic arch which will change its proportion at pleasure.
The ellipse occurs and meets the case, but it offends your eye. At
length, however, the pointed arch suggests itself, and gets rid of the
whole difficulty. So similar are a Romanesque and an Early Pointed bay
in all other respects, that the change of proportion which I have
described seems at once to effect the whole change in style.
Had the constructional motive alone existed, the pointed form would have
been confined to arches of considerable span; but the demand for a
variable arch adding æsthetic to the constructional claim, caused its
speedy adoption in positions where strength alone would not have
demanded it, though the semicircle, the plain segment, and the segmental
pointed arch, were, at all subsequent periods of the style, used side by
side with the true pointed form.
I have been the more particular in showing the true reasons for the
change in the form of the arch, because the great majority of writers
treat it purely as a matter of taste and of altered fashion; indeed,
some excellent writers on the history of Mediæval architecture have
strangely imagined that the pointed arch had a greater outward thrust
than the round, and that the increased projection of the buttresses was
necessitated by its use, instead of the two being simultaneously
introduced as a double means of avoiding the evils experienced from the
great thrust of the round arch and the small buttresses by which it had,
during the Romanesque period, been accompanied.
I will now close my present lecture, but hope in the next to carry on
the same inquiry into a number of other details, as well as into the
general spirit and principles of the architecture of which I am
treating, and to add some practical remarks on the application of the
_rationale_ thus traced out to our present revival of the style, and
such developments as it may give rise to.
LECTURE VII.
The Rationale of Gothic Architecture--_Continued_.
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