Details are what makes something make sense and completes it. Without details, the world would be bland and somewhat senseless. Therefore, it is details that make us good designers. The more attention we pay to detail, the more successful the design. Details should never be overlooked. As Mies van der Rohe said, “God is in the Details”—they are all important, omniscient and omnipotent. In them we find hope and salvation. The amount of detail used in the Gothic cathedrals is what makes these structures so breathtaking.
The amount of detail we use makes an impression about who we are as designers. Therefore, we must always be detail-oriented people. One thing we have been working on designing as a first year class are portals around the doorways to offices on the first floor of the Gatewood Studio Arts Building. These portals give an impression of what is to come. Likewise, what has come before is to make an impression on our portal designs: from our historical precedents to the artifacts we have designed throughout the semester thus far. The exterior and interior of the Gothic cathedrals give an impression of the religion- much of it works as symbols to tell the illiterate masses of God. These structures “were covered virtually from top to bottom with sculptural representation of biblical stories” becoming “a Bible for the illiterate, and what was especially important, the visual imagery was known and accessible to all—lord, merchant, servant, and serf alike” (Roth 2007).
The cathedrals, based on the Ancient Greek model, consisted of a porch, a court, and a hearth. These often elaborate exteriors created the porch. The narthex could be described as the court, which then led to the hearth, being the altar. For the Perception and Communication class, we have been working on drawings of buildings around campus. I have noticed in my assigned building, Mossman, that this porch-court-hearth principal also stands true. There are two entryways: creating hearths. There is a court, which is the very public waiting and gathering area. From there, offices—the hearth of the building—stretch outward and upward, to the pinnacle—the chancellor’s office, which could be described as a “super hearth”.
Also a part of this assignment is to make diagrams to further our and others understanding of the building. Different diagrams are efficient for showing different things: circulation, context, etc. We can use bubble, zoning, matrix, and many other kinds of diagrams to illustrate these things. The cathedrals quickly began to follow a pattern—their layout was diagrammed in a number of first applications of this building style. Roth states, “More than any previous medieval building type, the Gothic cathedral was quickly standardized in its plan and basic components” (Roth 2007).
The diagrams must be put together into an interesting and effective composition. A composition comes together as a sum of parts. Together, it all makes sense. Individually, things can lose their meaning. A detail with no context makes little sense to the audience. The Gothic cathedrals are full of beautiful details, but alone, they lose their meaning. Together, they create the beautiful buildings—compostitions—so well known and breathtaking. The following describes briefly the basis composition for the interior of a Gothic cathedral: Internally, the cathedral consisted of side aisles (sometimes two on each side of the nave) covered with rib vaults. The aisles opened through an arcade of tall, pointed arches to the nave. Above the arcade was a dark, narrow passage in the thickness of the nave wal, the tiforium gallery, whose height corresponded to that of the sloping wooden shed roof protecting the side aisle vaults. Avoe the triforium passage, the wall disappeared and became slender piers, opened up by broad, stained-glass clerestory windows subdivided by delicate stone tracery. The pier, a cluster of elongated colonnettes, continued up from the capital of the arcade pier, each colonnette in the bundle corresponding to one of the ribs overhead, the longitudinal, transverse, or diagonal arches in ther bit vault over the nave. (Roth 2007) Likewise, all the things we post on this blog comes together as a composition—displaying all the hard work we put into assignments and learning as much as we can.
In design, the scale ranges from macro to micro. A building or space within it and around it is a macro scale compared to a piece of furniture in it, yet compared to the greater world and universe, a building is on a very micro scale. Beauty can come from impressing the macro with the micro, as was often done in the design of Gothic cathedrals. The details, the micro things, are what make the composition so special.
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