the Case of Gothic

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The meaning of 'style' in traditional

architecture: the case of GothicJohn Thomas

Version of record first published: 08 Dec 2010

To cite this article: John Thomas (2000): The meaning of 'style' in traditional architecture: the case ofGothic, The Journal of Architecture, 5:3, 293-306

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In modern times, we have come to think of tradi-

tional or historic architecture as a collection of

styles, different kinds of building form. But what

are the meaning and nature of a style? While

recent times have seen considerable interest in the

kinds of architecture called Classical, attempts to

discover what that may mean and what Classical

designing and building may involve,1 there has

been less attention given to Gothic, which may be

regarded as the alternative tradition of European

architectural history.

The starting point for understanding architectural

style, I would suggest, is the realisation that specicstyles are a recent invention, in that, in most cases,

they were created after the process and tradition of

building in that form or manner ceased to be the

normal activity. Style begins with naming. Words or

phrases which name styles have the function of

identifying, dening and conceptualising. As Louis

Kahn put it, style is an adopted order, and order is

intangible. It is a level of creative consciousness.2

Before that process has taken place, the physical

material of buildings is largely amorphous and ill-

understood. It is notable that most style names or

labels, perhaps with the exception of Classical, were

ideologically determined in their origin, and con-

tained derogatory value-judgements. Gothic is the

best example of this, as it was named in a period

when the appreciation of it was at its lowest point.

For Renaissance Humanists, the centuries between

Classical civilisation and its revival in their own times

was an unfortunate hiatus, a middle age, when

the barbarous tribes of Goths, Vandals and others

destroyed much of Graeco-Roman culture; in its

stead, it was supposed, the same peoples eventuallyproduced a culture which included the pointed-arch

architecture which they called Gothic, although

Vasari has been considered the actual originator of

the term. The later term Baroque originated in much

the same way, its Portuguese/Spanish and Italian/

French versions implying the corrupt, contorted,

degenerate and bizarre distortion of Renaissance

Classicism.3 Terms of this kind generally saw a

change of meaning, and a slow removal of the

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The meaning of style intraditional architecture: the caseof Gothic

John Thomas 28 Cromer Road, South Norwood, London, SE254HH, UK

The stylesof traditionalarchitecturehavebeen understood invariousways, butwhat

actuallyarethey,andwhatis involved inreferringtoaparticularstyle?In recentyears,

much attention has been given to themeaning and placeof Classicalarchitecture,but

Gothic has tended to stay in the shadows of nineteenth century ideas and concerns.

Itmay be, however, that Gothic can be seen outside of traditional theories and asso-

ciations;itmaybepossibletounderstandit inpurelyphysicalterms.Ifso, itsformsand

naturemaybeabletoberecognisedasastrand inthe complexworldof contemporary

buildingdesign.

2000TheJournalof Architecture 13602365

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niversityofSingapore]at03:0203August2012


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outside of concerns with Christian civilisation and

faith. Thus, the non-believer Eugene Viollet le Duc

could be fully committed to Gothic on the basis of

the faith of rationalism, understanding Gothic as a

specically-rational system of ordering static forces,

seen most clearly of course, in his introduction, in

the Entretiens sur larchitecture, of iron members

into the construction process, with their resultingeffects of what must be called stylistic evolution.9

The most important feature of modern under-

standings of pointed architecture, side by side with

theories of rational construction, and products of

historical development, has been that of its associ-

ations, or associationism. George L. Hersey has

shown how the style, and indeed, architecture as a

whole, was host to a wide variety of associations,

and bore associational meanings of feeling, physi-

cal traits, and even gender.10 Associationism per-

haps reaches its climax with Ruskins celebrated

account of The Nature of Gothic, which formed

chapter 6 of the second volume (1851) of The

Stones of Venice. Here he refers to Gothicness as

an immediately-recognisable something which

existed to a greater or lesser extent in works of

architecture, and most completely in what he con-sidered to be the nest products of Mediaeval build-

ing. The something consisted of various qualities,

which he named and described at some length:

Savageness, Changefulness, Naturalism, Grotesque-

ness, Rigidity and Redundance. Savageness

acknowledged the rude, wild, barbaric nature of

Gothic architectures supposed Northern origins;

Changefulness involved variety, and this meant the

intrinsic freedom of masons and sculptors, which

Figure 1. Chapels in

a choice of Gothic

styles (F. J. Jobsons

Chapel and school

architecture, 1850).

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was an inevitable product of Christian society.Gothic was bound by no constricting rules, unlike

Classicism with its Orders, which, as we have seen,

was considered to be the product of a society based

on slavery. Naturalism was the delight in nature,

and the representation of the created world in a

spirit of truth; humanity, also, was represented truly

and freely. Grotesqueness is the mediaeval ten-

dency to the fantastic, the ludicrous, and the

bizarre. Rigidity, he is at pains to describe as active

rigidity, the tensions and forces which powerfully

bind structures together. Redundance implies the

exuberance, lavishness, and excess he evidenced in

Gothic building.

For others, the qualities and associations of

Gothic had a darker side than Ruskin would per-

haps have allowed. Mary Anne Schimmelpennick,

in a book of 1859 which drew on a work of hers

published in 1815, pre-dating the propaganda of

Pugin and the Ecclesiologists, saw Mediaeval archi-

tecture as containing remnants of a dark period in

Christian history, when the pagan tribes of north-

ern Europe were rst evangelised, and missionaries

and saints suffered hideous martyrdom and torture.

Her Classication of Deformities sees such features

as Gothic cable mouldings as relics of the ropes thattied victims, saw tooth of saws used to dismember

missionaries bodies, hatched mouldings of execu-

tioners axes, beakheads of the birds and wild

beasts which fed on victims remains, and chevrons,

of chains and the rack.11 Modern discussions of

mid-nineteenth century, or High Victorian Gothic,

abound with arguments about church designers

intentional ugliness, distortion, and even cruelty.

These discussions take their impetus from John

Summersons 1949 essay on William Buttereld;and yet Butterelds architecture had associations of

this kind even for contemporary critics. The

Ecclesiologists, moreover, waged a campaign

against excessive personal comfort being intro-

duced into church furnishings, considering that

hard wooden pews, replacing the cushioned box

pews of the previous century, and unheated build-

ings, were spiritually edifying.12

The darker origins of modern Gothic cannot be

denied. In a recent book on the Gothic Revival,

Chris Brooks has shown how eighteenth century

Gothick emerged amidst a literary culture which

went back beyond the Gothic novels of the mid-

to-later Georgian period to the Graveyard school

of poets, of the rst part of the century, and even

to the publishers of broadside ballads in the seven-

teenth.13 They concentrated, he writes, on the

horrid and uncanny, those mental and material

regions in which our most primitive feelings were

believed to originate. Within a few years the mode

of sensibility that emerged was being labelled

gothic.14 And with the coming of the Gothic

novel proper, Horace Walpoles The Castle of

Otranto (1764), and its successors, the association

between the trappings of Gothic and the horricwere fused, leading directly to Frankenstein (1818),

and later Dracula (1897).

The curious thing about the Gothic novel is that

Walpoles nightmarish, gloomy Otranto is not paral-

leled by the reality of his Strawberry Hill villa

(1752mid 1770s), nor a host of other Gothick

buildings (such as Shobdon church, Herefordshire,

17526), which are so aesthetically light, bright and

physically imsy, that they have earned the style

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label Rococo Gothic. It is one thing to have agloomy, nightmarish imagination, but the physical

environment you surround yourself with can be

totally different, indeed wholesome. But the origins

of Gothick surely are to be found amidst the

darker side of human experience and so it must

be considered that Renaissance thinkers did not, in

truth, behave entirely unjustly when they

connected pointed architecture with the non-

rational. Victorian Gothicists changed that reality

beyond recognition. For them, as we have seen, it

became the architecture of holiness and truth. They

would thus have been dismayed to nd that the

twentieth century returned Gothic to the regions

of human darkness, at least in Brookss account;

his Epilogue Twentieth-Century Gothic is lled,

not with such as Liverpool Cathedral (190480),

sadly, but with horror novels and lms, punk pop

groups, ugly adolescents, and internet nasties

side by side with Disneys Snow White castle,

Florida.15

That the historical, structural, and associational

theories of Gothic are inadequate as a means of

understanding and evaluating it was realised even

before the age of styles, the pre-Modern

Movement period, came to an end. The identi-cation of Gothic with Christian civilisation and the

Christian era must only ever have been tenable

within the society which produced it, as evidenced

by the search for an appropriate Gothic language

for use in the missionary elds of far-ung lands;

and the idea of Gothic-as-Christian seems more

and more hollow, even as the understanding

belonging to a bygone age, the more we consider

the theory that the pointed arch was ultimately a

product of Islamic civilisation, imported into Europeas a result of cultural contacts with the world

outside Christendom.

Certainly todays pluralist society (where anything

goes, and all have to go together), breaks down

any notion of a unifying culture or set of values

and ideas which could create a spirit of the time

which we happen to live in. The idea of a prevailing

zeitgeist, creating culture and art, its products and

styles, may still be useful when looking at the arts

of the past, but its value today and in the imme-

diate future seems minimal. Once we see that the

major changes in architectural development have

come about, not as the result of shifts in the culture

and values of society as a whole, but as the result

of intense propaganda by a very few highly

committed and well-resourced individuals, the

historicist theory collapses. If Lord Burlington,

Pugin, Ruskin and Ecclesiological leaders Benjamin

Webb and J. M. Neale had all died at birth, the

development of British architecture would have

been unrecognisably different. Pevsner, in the same

article, is at pains to argue that architectural

changes come about by revolution, not gradual

evolution; no revolution can have more than a

handful of leaders.The structural approach to style was criticised

ruthlessly by Geoffrey Scott in The architecture of

humanism (1914),16 in which this brand of suppos-

edly scientic criticism is exposed as the mechan-

ical fallacy. The identication of architectural

beauty and effect with structural technology was,

Scott argued, a logical confusion between two

disparate kinds of things: the purely aesthetic

appreciation of displayed structure, and the actual

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structural appreciation of visible building technique.He also claimed that specically architectural

beauty is not the same as structural beauty, since

architecture can never be reduced simply to

construction engineering. Scotts whole book is a

defence of Renaissance Classicism against the

attacks of nineteenth century thinkers, particularly

Ruskin; this has the odd effect that he somewhat

disparages Gothic on the basis of accepting a

decidedly mechanical theory of Gothic: Gothic

architecture, strictly speaking, came into existence

when the invention of intermittent buttressing had

solved the constructive problem which had puzzled

the architects of the north ever since they had set

out to vault the Roman basilica.17 A fairer

approach to Gothic, once the mechanical fallacy

had been exposed (the fact that a style or kind of

architecture is ultimately independent of structural

methods) would have been to show clearly that

many buildings of the Middle Ages, indeed the vast

majority, except for a few grand projects, depended

largely on loadbearing masonry on which ornament

was applied or rather, in the case of Gothic, built

up as part of the outer skin not unlike Scotts

admired Renaissance buildings. The structural

understanding of architecture has outlasted the ageof the historical styles, with much present thinking

insisting that contemporary architecture must be

technology-driven. But with so much of todays

architecture, and indeed, the foundations of

modern architecture, it is the imageryof structure,

the visual expression of attitudes to construction

technology, that is dominant, as seen in the classic

example of the non-structural girders welded to

the side of Mies van der Rohes Seagram building.

By far the strongest association of Gothic, sostrong that it is easy to lose sight of it, is

Mediaevalism, the idea that this is a kind of archi-

tecture which cannot be disconnected from that

particular period of human history; even to suggest

that it can be so disconnected may seem absurd, to

some. But there is no logical connection between

pointed arch/ornament styles, and a supposed-

period which, as we have seen, only existed in the

minds of later critics. Of course the Gothic Revival

was the product of Mediaevalism of one kind or

another the nostalgic regard for, or desire to recall,

or even reproduce, the kind of society which existed

before the Renaissance and Reformation. But the

point is that, while it may be ludicrous to deny that

the style has any essential connection with the so-

called Mediaeval age, it was not, at that time,

employed in building in order nostalgically to evoke

its own society. Gothic Revivalists did just that; their

desire was that of nostalgia itself, and it was, of

course, nostalgia or excessive regard for something

which had never existed. Historical periods, like

styles of architecture and art, are merely mental

constructs, created after the thing has existed, to

effect a propagandist concern, or at least make life

easier for scholars.18

It has often been said thatPugin and his ilk could not have stood life in the

real Middle Ages for one moment with its disease,

squalor, poverty and suffering; such romantics as

could think of those times as glorious would have

been far too sensitive to bear much reality.

Pugins St. Giles, Cheadle (18416), and also

G. F. Bodleys Holy Angels, Hoar Cross (18726),

are attempts to create the kind of church that the

English Middle Ages would or might have

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more than that kind of architecture in which a high-pitched roof is raised over a pointed ceiling or vault,

or pointed arches beneath steeply-pitched gables

may be involved elsewhere in the building, as

details, or as major parts of the structure. To this

he adds foliation, which seems to mean both the

use, within arches, of cusps and foils, and the use

of oral decoration as part of this.19

Ruskins identication of a style with physical fea-

tures, which we can readily see and recognise,

whatever our cultural and associational environ-

ment, ies in the face of other explanations of the

nature of style. If, for example, this physical under-

standing of Gothic is preferred to the qualities,

then the cloying, redundant concerns of previous

ages values and sentiments are immediately

removed. If Gothic were able nally to escape the

nineteenth century, then it may be able to be

thought of as other than pseudo-, neo-, or fake.

Style might thus be seen as not a matter of ideas,

meaning, values, or construction, but the recogni-

tion of physical form, form which, as in Ruskins def-

inition, can be rationally identied and described.

What might be the aesthetic/physical elements

which cause us to recognise Gothicness in a

building? The steeply-pitched, pointed overallshape of a structure, referred to by Ruskin, is prob-

ably part of such recognition, but in addition to

pointed form, there is pointed detail. Verticality has

long been seen as an essential part of Gothic,

which has been considered to be the architecture

in which the vertical always triumphs over the hori-

zontal; but many Gothic buildings, Mediaeval and

nineteenth century, can be long, low, squat struc-

tures; and overall verticality may not of itself

produce a Gothic effect, as many skyscrapers attest.But a proportionally wide, low structure can appear

attenuated, or still have a vertical, visual effect, if

it is articulated with a grille of vertical lines as seen,

for example, in Barry and Pugins Palace of

Westmister (184060) (Fig. 3). However, there are

many 1970s and 1980s ofce blocks which appear

on the outside as a mass of vertical ribs, but are

not pointed in overall mass, eg. Abbey House,

Westminster (David Fairburn in consultation with

William Whiteld, 1979). The vertical forms hung

on the side of this fa ade seem to reect the Abbey

opposite, and particularly Henry VIIs chapel; but

this appearance, in itself, does not create

Gothicness, and Abbey House would not be

labelled Gothic.

The presence of pointed arches, windows and

doors, etc., was once considered the sine qua non

of Gothic:20 yet a building like John Vanbrughs

Castle House, Greenwich (c. 1717) can have all its

window arches round, and still be suggestive of a

Gothic castle (Fig. 4). One physical feature which

is found in the Gothic architecture of various

centuries is the diagonal, both in plan and eleva-

tion, and set together, diagonals produce nets of

tracery and vaulting rib-work, and diagonal, also,is the chamfering of mouldings, and the canting

and battering of walls.

Perhaps if a building possesses several, or all, of

the kinds of physical feature listed above: attenu-

ated, pointed overall form; pointed detail; striated,

vertical emphasis; pointed arches or openings; diag-

onals, perhaps set in grilles and nets, then its

appearance may, independent of any ideas we may

have about it, suggest Gothicness. A matter of

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John Thomas




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of which are articulated with close-set verticals

(buttresses and slit-windows), and the gable facing

the cathedral is lled with a mesh of diagonal

tracery-bars which seem to have developed themes

found in early twentieth century Arts & Crafts

Gothic (e.g. Randall Wellss church of St. Edward

the Confessor, at Kempley, Gloucestershire (1903))

(Figs. 6 and 7); the Gothic is inescapable here, yet

there are no pointed arches. A large, rather brash,

evocation of the Gothic style is the complex of

nancial centres known as Minster Court, in the

City of London (GMW Partnership, early 1990s).

With its raking gables and oriels, and glittering

travertine-clad pointed forms sticking out in all

directions, it is a modern-day equivalent, perhaps,of the large Gothic cloth halls, which were also cen-

tres of business and commerce, and were built in

the Low Countries in the Late Gothic period (Fig. 8).

Gothic also is the School of Engineering building at

De Montfort University, Leicester (Short Ford

Associates, 1993). This is another large building

which employs a wealth of pointed, striated articu-

lation, and its forms and materials unmistakably

Figure 5a and 5b.

Domestic castle-like

architecture, round-

arched: Castle

House, Greenwich

(John Vanbrugh, c.

1717)

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John Thomas




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Figure 6a, 6b, 6c.

Hereford Cathedral

Library and Mappa

Mundi Exhibition

(William Whiteld,

1996).

Figure 7. Diagonal

tracery net at

St. Edward the

Confessor, Kempley,

Gloucestershire

(Randall Wells,

1903).

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12. Ibid., pp. 6871. J. Summersons William Buttereld,

or the glory of ugliness was a lecture given in 1945,

later published in The Architectural Reviewand nally

in Heavenly mansions and other essays (London, The

Cresset Press, 1949), pp. 159176.

13. Chris Brooks, The Gothic revival (London, Phaidon,

1999), pp. 10715.

14. Ibid., pp. 11011.

15. Ibid., pp. 40820. Liverpool Cathedral, and many

other major twentieth century works, are crammed

into the previous chapter, 13,Cathedrals and Gothic.

The late Gothic revival, as a sort of embarrassing

left-over.

16. G. Scott, The architecture of humanism (1914), Ch. IV.

17. Ibid., pp. 967.

18. See Charles Jencks, History as myth, in C. Jencks and

G. Baird (eds), Meaning in architecture (London, Barrie

& Rockliff, 1969), pp. 24565; architects, as histori-

ans, make myth, claims Jencks, quoting Oscar Wilde:

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

19. Ruskin, op. cit., Vol. II, VI, pp. 79110.

20. Ibid., Vol. II, VI, p. 80.

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John Thomas



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