On the Arch

The Romans may not have created the arch, the curved lintel, but they moved the engineering fast forward and spread this architectural form far and wide. Take a few arches and you've got a vault, the basis for a cathedral.

For an important entrance there is no more beautiful architectural form than the curve of an arch. It says, lofty things happen when you enter here.

The arch looks to defy gravity, with its series of stones above you. And yet the stones work together, in perfect wedged shapes pulled together instead of apart.

What is your keystone?

The shape has always made me think of a bow, bent to an even curve. Or maybe it is the word arch - archery. Looking up arch now, I find that the word comes from the Latin for arrow.

As durable as the arch has been in mosques, churches, and civic buildings are they now a part of history? Are there new buildings that incorporate the arch in a new way, other than Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch?

Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. - Henry Miller

I'm glad I discovered the artist Andy Goldsworthy through the books documenting his works. His stone and ice arches will make you think again about the shape, and in unconventional ways. Check him out.


This is a photo I took of a school's entrance, April 2004.