Basilica of Saint-Denis

node · earth

The abbey church north of Paris rebuilt under Abbot Suger, whose new choir and ambulatory - consecrated in 1144 after work from about 1140 - are conventionally taken as the first coherent Gothic interior. What is assembled there is not new in its parts: the pointed arch, the rib vault and the buttress all exist beforehand. What is new is the combination, applied to a double ambulatory with radiating chapels so that the wall between the chapels almost disappears and the chapels read as one continuous glazed band. Suger left an unusual thing for a patron - written accounts of the rebuilding and of his intentions, including his theology of light - so this is one of the few points in medieval architecture where a building and a client's stated reasoning survive together. The reasoning is theological rather than structural: light as a route to the divine. The engineering was the means.