4 ideas
A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. The difference is not size or function. Architecture is building designed with a view to aesthetic appeal, so almost anything that encloses space can become architecture if it is shaped deliberately to move the viewer.
A building can work on the viewer in three distinct modes: as a two-dimensional surface, through the treatment of walls and the proportions of windows and facades; as a three-dimensional mass or sculptural volume seen from outside; and as enclosed space experienced by moving through it. Space is the mode peculiar to architecture, and the periods can be read by which mode they privilege and how they combine the three.
Pevsner treats each architectural style as the built expression of the spirit of its age: its religious feeling, social order and way of seeing. Read this way, a sequence of forms becomes a history of mentalities, with Romanesque weight, Gothic aspiration and Baroque movement each standing for a changed attitude to the world.
Between about 1140 and 1144, the choir of the abbey church of Saint-Denis near Paris was rebuilt under Abbot Suger by a master mason whose name is unknown. Pointed arches, rib vaults and thin supports were combined into a ring of chapels filled with light from large stained-glass windows, and Pevsner takes this as the birth of Gothic. None of the elements was new, since rib vaults had appeared at Durham and pointed arches in Burgundy; the novelty lay in fusing them into one system aimed at height, lightness and a glowing, dematerialized wall.