Abstract

[“Stone Vaults” and “Flying Buttresses”: Architecture, destiny and moral reasoning in Notre-Dame de Paris]. In the pages of Notre-Dame de Paris, a tragedy in the form of a novel unfolds. The protagonists are crushed by the impact of fate, causing undeserved pain which they are unable to remedy. The passions that stir them are instruments of destiny, which moves at a decisive pace and determines moral and material catastrophes. Not even art is safe from fate. Architecture can do nothing to counteract the communicative and dissemination potential of Gutenberg’s press. The massive expressive conformation of architecture is replaced by the speed, economy and versatility of the printed book. The presses of Mainz inaugurated the “liquid” (Bauman) or, rather, “volatile” (Hugo) modernity of knowledge.