How to Build a Cathedral

by Malcolm Hislop

Gothic cathedrals are astonishing feats of construction and engineering, from a period before steel frames and machine tools, breathtaking in their scale and grandeur even hundreds of years after these historic symbols of the Christian faith were built

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction, History

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Jared]

A comprehensive amateur's summary of Gothic architecture, though slightly misleading in the sense that the focus lies primarily on the description of how cathedrals were built, and provides comparatively little in terms of providing the reader a toolkit with which they can actually design one; not that it would be the average reader's goal, but hey, Minecraft exists...

[Linda]

Fascinating book. I really liked all the thorough drawings of all the elements. It helped that I´d visited Paris just before buying this book, so I´d already seen plenty of gothic churches. I really liked that the book build up chronologically, also detaillling the roles of the different workers during the building. The ´example cathedral´ also helped a lot to clarify and put it in sequence.
Recommended for anyone who´s interested in church architecture and - history!

[John]

Excellent work! Informative and accessible. Great sketches and illustrations, too.

This book creates a dilemma for me: to tear it apart and tape the pages all over my walls, or leave this beautiful volume intact.

[Jennifer]

The book group theme of the month was 'medieval'. I love a cathedral and I love specialist jargon... this book (which is very much about medieval cathedrals) was still mindboggling.

I loved the detailed illustrations (the scale emphasised by the tiny human figures) especially the fold out double height pages. I also thought it was a great idea to run the building of Salisbury Cathedral in particular through the book, punctuating the specifics with a progress description and illustration.

There's lots to think about here: the timescales, the motivations, the collapses. There seemed little about the dangers (there's an illustration for which we are supplied with a very detailed description of what is going on, with the exception of the chap falling headlong from the tower, presumably because the author did not consider him actively engaged in cathedral building by that point)

Has whetted my appetite to see those I've not seen before and re-visit those I have to appreciate more details,

[Anna Jeffries]

This is a lovely and delightfully well-organised basic explanation of everything that went into the construction of Medieval cathedrals.

[Rudi]

Uitgeleend zag er mooi uit

[Marie]

a really lovely, wonderful book, although not for the architectural newbie.

[Aviva D]

Echt wel de moeite. Vooral ook door de uitklapbare platen.