Gothic architecture is the style of european architecture from the mid-12th to the 16th century, defined by the pointed arch, ribbed vault, and flying buttress.
Gothic architecture emerged around 1140 with Abbot Suger's reconstruction of the Abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris, the first building to combine the pointed arch, the ribbed vault, and the flying buttress in a coherent system. Together these innovations allowed walls to be thinned to skeletons of stone supporting vast windows of stained glass. The cathedrals at Chartres (begun 1194), Reims (begun 1211), Amiens (begun 1220), and Notre-Dame de Paris (begun 1163) brought the style to its high classical phase in 13th-century France, with naves rising over forty metres. The English variant produced Salisbury, Lincoln, and Wells; the German tradition culminated in Cologne Cathedral; Italian Gothic remained more horizontal. Late Gothic developed regional variations — Flamboyant in France, Perpendicular in England, Sondergotik in Germany. The 19th-century Gothic Revival of Pugin, Viollet-le-Duc, and Ruskin gave the style a second life, and Gothic forms continue to influence church architecture into the 20th and 21st centuries.