Into Thin Air: France, Germany, and the Invention of the Openwork Spire

Abstract

Openwork spires have generally been seen as typical of the German Late Gothic sphere, but they also mark the culmination of the trends toward greater height and skeletal structure already evident in French Gothic architecture of the thirteenth century. This essay argues that the completion of the first openwork spire, built in Freiburg im Breisgau between roughly 1300 and 1330, was made possible by the intersection of French architectural ideas imported through the prestigious cathedral workshops of Cologne and Strasbourg and Germanic patronage patterns in which civic pride and burgher donations played a crucial role.