ABSTRACT
From its inception as a distinct historical epoch in modern historiography, the Middle Ages has served as a counter-point to the present. Enlightenment rationalism condemned the medieval epoch as one of oppressive barbarism, while the Romantic tradition represented the medieval as belonging to a long-lost age of spiritual transcendence. The inheritance of the Middle Ages has thus remained a deeply ambivalent cultural paradigm, both attracting and repelling successive modern onlookers. Some of the most vivid symbols of this persistent historical ‘other’ belong to the domain of urban architecture. Two leading architectural motifs define the spectrum of such modern visions of medieval urban order: on one side stands the soaring Gothic cathedral, on the other the walled city, enclosing a dense maze of gabled houses grouped around a central marketplace. Modern architects have consciously evoked both the cathedral and the market town as points of reference in their conceptions of the contemporary city, and different artistic strands of the nineteenth century, notably the Arts and Crafts movement, had already sublimated Gothic architecture and the ‘primitive’ creativity of the medieval craftsman. In effect, the Modern Movement, despite its radical claims, never truly emancipated itself from the images of either medieval or classical culture, categories that remain rooted in the architectural imagination, whatever the particular attitude adopted toward them. 1
