Nº 006

flying buttress

/ˈflaɪ.ɪŋ ˈbʌt.rəs/noun · English, Gothic

An arm that holds a wall from outside.

A half arch (flyer) that carries the outward push of a stone vault from the upper wall to a pier standing away from the building.

The film, in words

Gothic cathedrals should have fallen outward. These arms hold them in.

It's called a flying buttress: a half arch that leaps from the upper wall to a pier standing outside.

Stone vaults push the walls outward. The flyer catches that push high up and carries it down the pier to the ground.

Freed from the load, the walls could be thin, and filled with huge windows of stained glass.

At Notre-Dame de Paris, they appeared around 1180, among the first on a Gothic cathedral.

Its cousins: the stepped rings of the Pantheon in Rome, the giant buttresses of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

Flying buttress. An arm that holds a wall from outside.