Gothic Clerestory and Flying Buttress, Leiden

29 April 2025 · Leiden walk towards, in and around Burcht

A diagonal buttress cuts across warm red brick, anchoring the eye before it reaches the clerestory above. The tracery windows — two registers of lancets and foliate stonework — pull the geometry upward into a deep summer sky. Gothic architecture does the compositional work here; the structure itself is the graphic argument. Leiden's medieval church facades carry this kind of layered detail precisely because they were built to be read from below.