Seven rooms, a thousand years, and a great deal of stone that someone spent their whole life cutting.
An exhibit you walk rather than scroll. Each era is a hall; each building hangs on its wall as a large picture with a plaque under it. Step up to one and the catalogue opens: what it is, why it was built, and how it stands up — its structure, its vaults, the trick that made it possible.
The buildings were chosen for two reasons at once: they mattered to the history of building, and there are enough good photographs of them — outside, inside, and close up — to be worth hanging on a wall.
Every photograph here comes from Wikimedia Commons and is public domain or released under a Creative Commons licence. Each image keeps its photographer and licence with it — open Picture credits at the foot of any catalogue entry, or click a picture to see the credit under the full-size version. A complete list lives in CREDITS.md in the repository.
Preference was given to images the Commons community has marked as Featured, Quality or Valued — so the walls carry the best photographs available rather than merely the first ones found.
The history and architecture notes were written for this exhibit and draw on the standard literature on each building. Dimensions are the figures usually published for each structure; medieval measurements are rarely exact and sources disagree by a metre here and there. Each entry links out to a fuller account if you want to go further.
No 3-D engine, no libraries. The halls are ordinary HTML elements pushed around in space with CSS transforms; the stone, the vaults and the rose windows are SVG drawn by a few dozen lines of code. The room tone, if you switch it on, is synthesised in the browser — there is no sound file.
Set in Cormorant Garamond and Inter. Built as a static site and hosted on GitHub Pages. Corrections and additions are welcome in the repository's issue tracker.