Despite many years of traveling to France, I still can’t help but marvel at the towering Gothic churches that mark the heart of many French cities.
The Gothic style of architecture, primarily employed in churches, evolved in medieval France as a way to give interior spaces a better-lit, more upward-reaching feel than the dark, heavy Romanesque architecture that preceded it. As French urban life grew more stable, churches didn’t need to be so fortress-like — and engineering innovations allowed architects to built airier, vertical churches that seemed to stretch heavenward, their walls given over to windows to allow maximum illumination. Newly pointed arches allowed churches to grow higher and more dramatic on the outside, while making space for colorful stained-glass windows on the inside. Counterweight “flying buttresses” — stone arches that reach up from the ground to push back inward on relatively weak external walls, thereby supporting the roof — go even farther in making the interior of giant stone buildings feel almost weightless.
While it will be some time before visitors can once again take in France’s most famous Gothic wonder, Paris’ Notre-Dame cathedral, plenty other magnificent Gothic cathedrals are sprinkled across the…
