Quote:
Originally Posted by pj3000
But, indeed, the Cathedral of Learning lawn is not a European medieval town center.
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But it could be!
Obviously aesthetic preferences can vary, but for me it is VERY odd to have Gothic architecture without a Gothic setting.
Just a brief note. Gothic architecture with its distinctive pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses, and so forth was all about building up as high as possible, given the limitations of the materials available at the time. The reason they were building up was sometimes romanticized as reaching up to the heavens and such, but in practice what was really going on is that towns and cities in the High/Late Middle ages were growing, and as always in such situations centrally-located land was becoming precious, and that meant wanting to build up as much as possible.
OK, so now look at Heinz Chapel:
https://www.heinzchapel.pitt.edu/gallery/exterior
Why would you build something that looked like that? Well, originally they would build something something that looked like that so it could be tall but also skinny. And why skinny? So they could fit it into the middle of a growing town or city without using up so much land.
OK, so to me, when I see something like Heinz Chapel sitting in the middle of a giant lawn, I think--WTF? That's totally out of place for that sort of architecture. Indeed, it sort of reminds me of pictures of European cities which got bombed to hell in WWII, and somehow a single building escaped (or got restored).
Anyway, people like what they like. But my trump card, so to speak, is that at least what I like makes sense of the architectural style of Heinz Chapel.
And all the more so the Cathedral. I mean, that is literally combining Gothic building techniques with early-20th Century skyscraper techniques, to build what ended up supposedly the second-tallest Gothic-style building in the world--after the Woolworth Building in NYC, which (seriously) was sometimes known as the Cathedral of Commerce. And of course the Woolworth Building is in an appropriate urban setting, because that is what it was designed for:
So to me, the Cathedral is even MORE out of place than the Chapel.
In that sense, if you believe in "form follows function" to ANY significant degree, I think sticking these forms designed for dense urban settings in the middle of a giant lawn is just wrong.
But again, I recognize my strong feelings on this subject may not be widely shared--yet.
But if we ever did build up around them with high-quality Gothic buildings, I am dead sure no one would then want to tear them down just for more green space.