Architecture

Many builders once feared the world would end in the year 1000, so lasting works seemed hardly worth the effort. When the year passed and the world remained, Europe answered with churches—larger, richer, and more ambitious than before.

T. Roger Smith follows the changing forms of architecture from medieval Europe into the Renaissance, beginning with the churches that rose after the turn of the millennium. In England and across the continent, builders moved from heavy walls and semicircular arches toward the pointed style that would define Gothic architecture; Smith compares this gradual transformation to the growth of a language, changing over centuries yet retaining its unity. He traces the stages of Gothic and the styles that followed, showing how local materials, customs, and rival ambitions shaped buildings in different lands. How did a shared architectural language become so varied—and what changed when the Renaissance arrived?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.