Usage of Gothic Cathedral

¶ … Gothic Cathedral as Rhetorical Device

Usage of Gothic Cathedral

Viollet-le-Duc.

It is one thing to believe that the structure of Gothic cathedrals were a response to a desire to imbue meaning and particularly a manifestation of faith in a building that was functionally a place of worship, gathering, and the seat of local power. It is quite another to posit, as did Viollet-le-Duc, that the ultimate shape assumed by a Gothic cathedral was a mere rational response to solving structural problems. If the Gothic cathedral is thought to be completely rational in its expression, then it may also be thought of as the only possible expression, given the structural challenges it was designed to solve. Viollet-le-Duc sought correspondence between the materials used in a building with the structure that eventually took shape. He particularly believed that the use of stone to build a cathedral was both rational and functional. With stone, an architect could create a structure that would maximize the effect of height and elevation, thereby addressing both the functional and cultural needs of a cathedral. Any decoration applied to contribute meaning and interest to the structure, such as the gargoyles on Notre Dame, should also leave the structure visible. Viollet-le-Duc engaged in the restoration of many historic buildings, including numerous cathedrals. The functions or purposes of the designs were not of significance to him, nor were any design elements that were intended to connote culture.

Robert Venturi.

Venturi deplored the absence of meaning and cultural significance in modern architecture. Contrasting modernist architecture to historical styles, Venturi would argue that historical architecture is deeply and richly meaningful, and that it speaks directly to the cultural significance of the buildings' conceptions and origins. There is, according to Venturi, a place for decoration as an expression of cultural meaning in even the most ordinary and functional of buildings. Venturi's sensibilities were troubled, if not offended, by the ordinariness of modernist architecture. Ordinary, as it were, because it is unrelenting in its plainness and gives no hint of the complex structural problems that had to be solved in order to give such an impression of simplicity. Unlike the Gothic Cathedral that left open to view all the complex puzzles that were solved in order to manifest the concept -- the structure -- that was grand and inspirational. Venturi seeded his work with meaning through the use of subtle historical reference. Where this was perhaps most sensitively executed was in adaptive reuse or renovation. Here Venturi extended contextualization but gave it a new freedom, in that, he gave permission for cultural layering in function, decoration, and the juxtaposition of traditions. There was in his application congruence with Brown's constructs about context, and also alignment with Viollet-le-Duc regarding the importance of letting structure show through, even if the function of the building was radically changed. In large part, Venturi would be likely to argue, this is important because it is in the historical attributes that meaning is preserved and found.

Denise Scott Brown.

Brown objected to the idea that popular architecture could not convey meaning. She believed not only that it did, but that it should. Cultural meaning was to her essential to the constructed environment. Brown defended her interest in the tastes of the masses and her narrative about the status quo. She refused to project her own judgment before she had explored vernacular taste and sensibilities from, she would argue, was an objective perspective. Brown's position was that an architect should not take the people living in an environment out of any plans to renovate or completely make over that environment. The danger of a purely functional approach to architecture is that one does absent cultural meaning and historical reference. What Brown clearly conveyed, in voice and design, was the importance of respecting the environment, the context, in which one builds. Brown would have artists and architects ground themselves in the popular -- what she called "pop" -- culture as a way of investigating functional needs, social context, cultural meaning, and aesthetic expression. Brown was quick to caution architects who would judge the urban context with the caveat that inhabitants of certain localities may not reside where they would prefer to, nor might they be able to reconfigure their habitations to their liking. Brown not only linked people as found in their quotidian contexts to architecture, but she insisted that new forms of architecture must also link to the formal traditions of architecture. The new experiences, then, could be understood in light of formal architectural training.