The Babel Fiasco (Part IV: Hermeneutic Buttress)

Gloucster Cathedral, Transept Wall. Photo by Andrea Kirkby

…at Gloucester Cathedral (c. 1332) we see a superadjacency that is contradictory in scale and direction:  the enourmous diagonal buttress intersects the plane of the delicate order of arcades in the transept’s wall. (Robert Venturi, Complexity & Contradiction in Architecture).

Such a violent adjacency suggests a curtailing of the ever-upward rhythm of the fragile elements in the transept; it is as though the plane of experience is making itself known amongst all this striving for infinity.  It is the violence of this juxtaposition that could be called the hermeneutic line, a reminder of the Augustinian dichotomy of an earlier time.  The “dust of the ground” is flung in the face of man’s attempt to manufacture the sacred.  The diagonal buttress is profane; it reminds us that the delicate order, though suggesting the divine, are also profane.  The Gothics, with Ecclesiastes and the Babel Fiasco in mind, must resist even the earthly idea of perfection.  Even as they approach the manufacture and personification of meaning as the Christian understands it (the attainment of heaven on earth), the Gothic turns away.  Sensing Babel and the shame inflicted by God for the manufacture of name-making.

Thus the great negating strike of the diagonal buttress.  Given the rhetorical flourish of the delicate order, one would expect a discreet structure held away from the fine lace of the transept.  Instead we witness a vicious attack, intersecting, slashing the finery of the vertical

Part V: The Hermeneutic Surface