DAVID LEVIN: You're listening to a NOVA podcast. I'm David Levin. Gothic cathedrals are some of the crowning achievements of Western architecture. They're more like giant sculptures than just ...

The inspiring and daunting austerity of the new Cathedral permeates every aspect of its architecture. Going against tradition and placing the main entrance to the extreme left of the facade, the ...

On April 4, 1942, the diarist Henry “Chips” Channon and a few of his friends paid a visit to Wells Cathedral—one of England’s early Gothic treasures—in the southwest county of Somerset. Having spent ...

It has been eight centuries, to the year, since Pope Honorius III issued an edict to raise money for a new cathedral in the city of Metz. And while it would be years before the first stone was laid, ...

Wells Cathedral is the focus of one of the most complete medieval townscapes to survive in Europe. Its immediate surrounds formerly constituted an ecclesiastical enclave, partly enclosed by walls and ...

That church was the Cathedral of Santiago Apóstol. Although its façade evoked European neoclassicism, its structure reflected early twentieth-century industrial engineering. Prefabricated in Belgium, ...