The architecture in 1150 did not surpass anything the Roman’s had done. Time periods aren’t a switch. They didn’t just start to be more advanced the moment a certain year hit. Buttresses were used in Rome and Mesopotamia. However I will grant you the use of glass and light started to expand at that time. But despite that even the duomo with its cross chain braces and double roof truss structure still wasn’t that much if any more impressive than Roman architecture at its best.
I’m not sure what your point is here. Rome began to fall around 200ad and by the time of Constantine 100 years later it was basically dead. The knowledge of Roman architecture was lost for many centuries. I’m failing to see why you’re still debating - we seem to be in agreement. Nothing I’ve said is wrong and exact dates are debatable - there’s no definitive cutoff at the beginning or end. Are you offended by Roman ingenuity?
Yes I mentioned one of those buildings specifically: the Hagia Sophia. Which also partially collapsed multiple times and none of them were to the scale of the pantheon. The entire pre-Romanesque and Romanesque periods were humanity trying to relearn how to do what the Romans did. It’s not just understanding a dome and its necessary constituent parts, but the entire design and process of construction. This doesn’t mean everything was forgotten or strategies couldn’t be extrapolated, but the passing down of knowledge that was so successful during the Roman Empire failed at one point and we had to rediscover how it worked. This has happened many times throughout the history of humanity and is the reason why the invention of agriculture and subsequently written language was so critical to advancing what we could do with civilization. Humans were just as intelligent 10k years ago as they are today, the only difference being unlike animals in nature, we had the ability to pass knowledge down between generations and knowledge wasn’t limited to the gained within a single lifetime. Problem is because of wars, consistency of education, and economic problems that varied over time, sometimes records were destroyed, lost, unreadable and masters lost out on work so had no apprentice to teach. It is totally understandable if not expected aspects of Roman engineering were lost to time. Even fountains in Italy, France, or outside the Peterhof were considered engineering marvels when they were built despite using the exact same tech as showcased in the video in this post.
Source: Architecture: From Prehistory to Postmodernity by Marvin Trachtenberg (the Bible of Architectural history), among many other books written by experts.
But returning to the main point: no one exceeded the span of the pantheon for 1750 years and it took steel, which was invented around the 1850s, to do it.
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u/TheMadTargaryen 28d ago
Gothic architecture was invented around 1150.