Here is a fascinating picture of Beauvais Cathedral which captures just how unfinished it is and which also shows (like a time-freeze) how these gothic cathedrals typically replaced older romanic churches:
If you are interested in the architecture and engineering of gothic cathedrals, I highly recommend the 2010 arte documentary "Cathedrals" - unfortunately, I was only able to find a German version:
Some basic background from Wikipedia to save you the time:
> The Cathedral of Saint Peter of Beauvais is a Roman Catholic church in the northern town of Beauvais, Oise, France.
> From 1569 to 1573 the cathedral of Beauvais was, with its tower of 153 meters, the highest human construction of the world. Its designers had the ambition to make it the largest gothic cathedral in France ahead of Amiens.
> Victim of two collapses, one in the 13th century, the other in the 16th century, it remains unfinished today, only the choir and the transept have been built.
I wonder if they even measured the height in 1569. I'm sure that they could, but I don't know whether they cared about whether one building was a meter or two taller than some other building. I think they cared more about grandeur and the perceived awe rather than guinness-style records. Certainly many would have advertised themselves as being the tallest. To my knowledge there was no central book of such records. I wonder in which year was it determined that this cathedral held the record. Was it only centuries later when some architect student did a thesis?
They were certainly capable of measuring the height. The tools have been known since antiquity. They couldn't build something like this without them.
And they were definitely competing with each other to build the tallest and most spectacular cathedral. There wasn't an official record book, but the architects were always aware of who was claiming to be tallest. If they didn't want to take the claim for granted, it was easy enough to go measure it yourself.
Just for one example: Ulm Minster was specifically designed to be taller than the one at Cologne:
It's actually a little ungainly-looking for that. The tower is out of proportion to the rest of it.
It wasn't just cathedrals. They were doing the same things with bell towers. The Leaning Tower of Pisa doesn't need to be that tall -- and if they'd built a more reasonably-sized tower, it would have been more stable.
Hi there, curious about the subject however I am not willing to download a pdf, as per recent revelations that adobe pdf has become a hacking vector. Any ability to add a url for web based content?
No need to download to anything other than localstorage.
There have been a half dozen vulnerabilities found in the Firefox extension code exploitable through PDF.js over the years, but this is a far better record than the hundreds of vulnerabilities identified in Acrobat Reader.
PDF.js does a lot less than Acrobat. It's much more focused on just displaying articles, and less about rich media interactions like embedding 3D models, Flash, videos, etc. in the PDF.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Ca...
If you are interested in the architecture and engineering of gothic cathedrals, I highly recommend the 2010 arte documentary "Cathedrals" - unfortunately, I was only able to find a German version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Wh_-02MaI
If I remember correctly, it discusses the structural weaknesses of several cathedrals (including Beauvais).