(piano music)
- [Man] We're in the Eastern most part
of Westminister Abbey, this is an ancient Gothic building.
This is a church that according to legend at least
goes back perhaps as early as the 7th century.
Some kings were buried here as early as the 11th century.
The king that's responsible for the chapel that we're in,
Henry VII, created this chapel as a place
for him to be buried and for his family to be buried
and he has created this incredibly lavish environment
as a setting for his burial.
- [Woman] Replacing an older chapel that was here.
- [Man] Now the 1500s means that
we're in the renaissance, but the English
are still building structures in the Gothic style.
- [Woman] Although the Gothic style is transformed
from its early conceptions in the 12th century.
- [Man] And we generally believe that
the Gothic was born in France, migrated to Germany,
migrated to England, and in England
there were three principles, styles of the Gothic.
The first is of simple early English Gothic architecture,
which is directly inspired by the French.
The second is the decorative Gothic
and then finally the perpendicular
and that's what we have here in its most grand flowering.
- [Woman] This is called the Ladies Chapel because
it's dedicated to the Virgin Mary,
our lady and the chapel is most famous for its vaulting.
- [Man] The vaulting is spectacular,
there's nothing like it.
When you look at the French Gothic,
you see these soaring vertical spaces,
these large open windows and this space has that,
but it also has tracery and a structural system
that is a complete departure from the French.
- [Woman] And it's overwhelmingly decorative.
Every surface that we're looking at has fine tracery.
- [Man] You also have these fans,
you have these hanging pendants, you have vaulting
at the ceiling that seems to defy gravity.
- [Woman] Normally when we think about Gothic architecture,
we think about a groin vault or a ribbed groin vault
where we can understand how the roof is supported.
- [Man] This is a difficult kind of architecture to describe
and I think one of the things that makes it difficult
is that the highly decorative nature
of the tracery obscures,
the actual structural system, and you're absolutely right
in the older French system,
the structure is exposed and in fact
the beauty of the building comes from the exposure
of the structural system.
Whereas here, we actually have layers of complexity.
So let's take this apart and explain how this works.
If you look at the interior elevation,
you can see massive windows
and clearly there's no real structural support there.
You can see that they're interrupted by a series of peers.
And of course those are weight bearing
and you can look outside and see that there's buttressing
it brings of that lateral thrust outside
and helps support the building.
- [Woman] And open up the walls to more windows,
which was a hallmark of the Gothic style.
- [Man] And is fully evident here.
So what happens is the windows go beyond
where the vaulting springs,
which allows for the spandrels to become really distinct.
And in this case actually they have been pierced.
- [Woman] By decorative tracery.
And then if we follow the piers up,
we see that they splay out into a fan shape.
- [Man] And those initial fans then do allow
for those more complete circular fans that are towards
the center of the vaults.
- [Woman] So it's almost like a decorative covering
on top of the vaulting.
- [Man] Well, with one exception,
which is that you have transverse ribs that intersect
with those cones and create a continuous structural system.
Although a highly decorative one.
- [Woman] And one where the decoration really does hide it
to such an extent that you really have to work
to locate those transverse arches.
- [Man] Well this surface is so complicated,
you have to work to find anything.
- [Man with foreign accent] We've walked outside
of Westminster Abbey around to the East end,
so we can look at the chapel from the outside
where the structure is a little more apparent.
- [Woman] We can see it heavily decorated flying buttresses.
- [Man with foreign accent] And those flying buttresses
draw the weight of the vaulting from the interior out
and down these unique octagonal buttresses.
- [Woman] And they're beautifully decorated
in that typical perpendicular style where we have
a sense of a thinness and fineness of the tracery.
- [Man with foreign accent] Other characteristics
of this late Gothic style known as the perpendicular
are large windows often made of grids
where the individual units tend to be elongated.
- [Woman] And what's fascinating about where we're standing
is that there's a building right across the street
that looks like it is also
from the perpendicular Gothic period,
but it is in fact Gothic revival,
and it was built in the 19th century.
- [Man] Hundreds of years later,
this is the famous Houses of Parliament.
- [Man with foreign accent] And it's the result
of a competition that require the use
of one of two historical styles,
either the Elizabethan or the Gothic.
And that speaks to the 19th century's interest in history.
But it also reminds us that by the 19th century,
the Gothic was understood
to be fundamental to English history.
- [Woman] And the language that one could draw on,
for important public buildings like the Houses of Parliament
that had associations to the church,
but also to a tradition of fine craftsmanship
and a vision of the city that was in sharp contrast
to the industrialization that was taking place
in England in the early 19th century.
(piano playing)