Gothic

Gothic tends to be thought of as a word meaning dark, scary, like those emo kids from high school. Similarly the name does get itself from a negative standard, Gothic got its name from the 'Goths' and it was used to describe the architecture as the video shown in class says "unrefined, barbaric and non roman". Which for the last one is true, Gothic is extremely not roman, which is exactly what they were going for. But the architecture was refined and it was "the apex achievement of medieval civilization," which from my point of view is pretty impressive.

Some of the most important parts of the Gothic times is it architecture. This included the pointed arch, the ribbed vault and the flying buttress. Some of these do sound familiar to the other time periods we have studied but the Gothic time really stepped it up and made these things unique to their times. The arch is something that has been seen so many times before, but now they have changed to making it pointed instead of rounded which makes everything more elaborate able to happen (shown picture 1). The ribbed vault was made possible by said pointed arches. This is because now that the arches are pointed the ribbed vault no longer needs huge walls to hold up the heavy ceilings. Also with the walls not having to be so bulky it allowed for more use of stained glass windows. With this it proved that sometimes the ceiling is so heavy that even the pointed arches cannot save, so to offset that they created the flying buttress (shown picture 2). The flying buttress was pretty much just an added support to the columns from the outside of the building, right where the stress levels are.




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Extra Credit Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WddZmeszXGk