Cathedral Architecture – How to build a Cathedral with Jon Cannon

I watched a very interesting program last night entitled ‘How to build a Cathedral with Jon Cannon’. The program looked to give an insight into how these magnificent buildings where designed and built, in a time when most ordinary people still lived in wooded huts, basic hand held tools, ropes and pulleys where the only tools and they had no concept of modern building design concepts such as stress. The most interesting idea that took from the program was that most of the initial Cathedrals in the UK where built soon after 1066 by the conquering Lords as a way showing their power control over their people. I realised that it is a practice of using architecture as a symbol of your control is still carried out today, this time by international companies who build huge skyscrapers as a way off showing their economic power.

The program, which it still available on Channel 4’s ‘On demand’ service is well worth watching – giving an overview of the evolution of the different design styles, how the master builders used simple repeating patterns and scaling to create hugely complex designs and some of the ingenious ways in which they solved problems.