The great Gothic cathedrals of Europe were designed with their thin walls, long windows, and unbelievably high ceilings to do one thing: make parishioners look upward. When visiting one as a tourist, one finds that all the other tourists are doing just that: looking up. Wondering at the marvels of creating such seemingly impossibly structures out of stone, structures that look delicate and immortal at the same time.
I can only imagine the learning curve involved in developing such a style of architecture. How many times did buildings come crashing down because of some hitherto unforeseen flaw?
In the eighteenth century, there was a revival of Gothic architecture, and this seems somehow appropriate as that was the age of Bach, who could compose music that even when it was descending in tones sounds like it’s ascending, like his Toccata and Fugue in F-major, BWV 540.