ABSTRACT
In the second half of the thirteenth century, the Rhineland emerged as one of the most dynamic centers of Gothic architectural culture, thanks largely to the flowering of architectural drawing and related design practices. The cathedral workshops of Strasbourg and Cologne, in particular, became laboratories for the development of new and complicated design solutions that would have been literally unthinkable without the use of drawing. It is hardly a coincidence, therefore, that many of the oldest surviving design drawings of the Gothic era are associated with these two workshops, and with the Freiburg workshop that depended so closely upon them. The radical transformative power of drawing was even more striking in the Rhineland than in the environs of Paris, because the break with earlier traditions was much sharper.
