Review: The Geometry of Creation: Architectural Drawing and the Dynamics of Gothic Design, by Robert Bork

Abstract

Robert Bork The Geometry of Creation: Architectural Drawing and the Dynamics of Gothic Design Farnham, UK, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2011, 484 pp., 240 b/w illus. $119.95, ISBN 9780754660620 In 1383 the Troyes cathedral chapter paid Henry de Bruisselles 20 sous “for a portrait for the … choir screen made on parchment … to show to the bourgeois and to the laborers of the city side by side with another portrait made by Michelin, the mason. The said bourgeois and laborers held that the portrait of Henry de Bruisselles was the better.”1 At about the same time, Peter Parler or his son, Wenzel, designed the upper stories of Prague cathedral’s south transept, revising a drawing begun three decades earlier. The same drawing, taken to Vienna by Wenzel, informed his work on the south tower of the Stephansdom. Drawings on parchment, complemented by wood or paper templates, small sketches, and full-scale engravings on walls and pavements, embody one intricate facet of the robust technology of architectural representation. Vehicles of communication, construction guides, and instruments of public persuasion, they informed all aspects of the late medieval building process. Robert Bork’s The Geometry of Creation: Architectural Drawing and the Dynamics of Gothic Design presents case studies of the use of drawings in architectural projects from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Although most of the six hundred surviving Gothic drawings are connected to building projects in the Holy Roman Empire, Bork extends his inquiry to examples in France and Italy to argue that the same design procedures were shared by masons working throughout Europe. Reconstructions of the geometry used to design plans, elevations, towers, tabernacles, and tombs are presented in precise diagrams using Vectorworks CAD software that allows information, gathered through meticulous observation of the original parchments, to be processed “with unprecedented flexibility and rigor” (20). Bork, whose account features masons at their drafting tables with compass and straightedge, resists excursions into the swamps of symbolic interpretation, and although he illuminates …