Gothic skins: Penitents at the cathedral

When the invention of the steel frame liberated buildings from load-bearing perimeter walls at the turn of the twentieth century, it inaugurated a design exploration of building ‘skins’ and cladding that has become increasingly imaginative in recent years with the adoption of new materials and the appearance of new geometries generated and made constructible by means of digital design (Murray, S., 2012, with earlier bibliography). Frank Bauer makes the case later in this volume that contrastive analogies between body and clothing, inspired by Gothic architecture, informed the earliest experiments in Cubist architecture in Czech lands. Building skins have taken on a structural function in some cases and their ‘performance’ in terms of environmental quality and energy stewardship is regularly assessed, even modeled in advance. The external walls of pre-modern buildings such as Gothic cathedrals perform in many ways that go beyond holding up the super-structure and can benefit from analysis in terms of ‘skin’.