by Ben Lima | 16 June 2010 | Architecture, Medieval
Designboom posts a blurb and excerpt from David Stephenson, Heavenly Vaults: From Romanesque to Gothic in European Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). (See also a review by Marcus Bunyan of the 2009 exhibition at John Buckley Gallery, Richmond, Australia; 2007 show at Julie Saul and Brian Sholis review.)
What appeals to me about this project is 1) seriality as a way of clarifying the logic of a type, and promoting comparative judgments, and 2) the dramatic flattening of the vaults into the photographic frame, in eliminating an entire dimension of information (i.e. verticality), focuses attention on just the secondary details that are unique to each building.
It would be interesting to compare these images with an aerial survey of the same structures. From the ordinary, human’s-eye view, they are quite familiar; the camera eye brings out their striking strangeness.
