Under "Production," our website provides a quick way to demonstrate the nature of the Gothic revolution.  You have a three-step dialectic in medieval architecture.  First (thesis) the Early Christian basilica with its thin walls, slender marble columns, wooden roof, large windows and interior glistening with light reflected from shiny surfaces.  The antithesis is the totally-vaulted Romanesque basilica with its thick walls reinforced with exterior buttresses, its massive supports encumbering interior spaces, its relative darkness resulting from small windows and its heavy barrel and groin vaults.  And Gothic presents itself as the synthesis where a new structural system allows the brightness of the Early Christian basilica to be achieved in a totally-vaulted space.  This revolution is made possible through the use of pointed arches and lightweight rib vaults, but above all by the creation of rigid peripheral supports (culées) from which flying buttresses can be launched to support the high vaults. 

The Three Revolutions of Western European Architecture

• The first architectural revolution: Roman industrialized concrete structures
• The second revolution: the stone skeleton of "Gothic"
• The third revolution: Modernism and the development of the skyscraper