by Albert Aunchman

Created on: May 20, 2008

The magnificent cathedrals of the medieval period symbolized God. These enormous buildings reminded people of His power and were built out of their respect for Him. The size of the cathedral in each town depended on how much money the bishop and the town could allocate to the project. Cathedrals were built out of a sense of religious fervor and civic pride. A common practice was for the bishop or one of his appointees to ask dying villagers if they would give all their possessions over to the effort to build the cathedral. The townsfolk volunteered much of the labor involved in building these structures.

During this medieval period, the earlier Romanesque churches, with their rounded arches, were being replaced with Gothic architecture. The gothic style was not merely about ornamentation. It brought innovative new construction techniques that allowed these new buildings to reach great heights. Medieval man saw himself as an imperfect reflection of the divine light of God. The airy quality of Gothic architecture, reflected in its soaring heights, and large stained glass windows, suggested the concept of divine light and dwarfed anyone entering the huge buildings.

Gothic vaults were very difficult to construct. The stones had to be placed in a precise manner to keep the vault form collapsing. Cathedrals had many vaulted roofs because the builders thought that it would reduce the risk of fire. It also gave the cathedral a finished look.

The problem in having so many of these vaults was that they exerted a tremendous amount of weight and pressure on the foundation. In order to spread out this weight and pressure, new methods of support had to be found.

Reaching back to the architecture of the Romans, who used internal buttresses in the design of their Romanesque buildings, and adapting it to create what is known as a "flying buttress" solved this problem.

A flying buttress is used to transmit the thrust of a vault across an aisle, chapel or cloister, to a buttress outside the building. To build the buttress, it was first necessary to build temporary wooden frames called "centering". The centering would support the weight of the stones and help keep the shape of the arch until the mortar dried. These were built on the ground and then hoisted into place and fastened to the piers at each end of the buttress.

The majority of the load was carried at the upper end of the buttress, so constructing the buttress as a semi-arch provided a much lighter and cheaper structure. As

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