As well as admiring the beauty of the building itself, I found myself deeply moved by the way it embodies human time. All buildings do this, but Chartres makes its temporal process more visible than most. It rises from the ancient crypt and foundations. Then it reaches its main twelfth- and thirteenth-century space of carvings, buttresses, and windows—all made using the most up-to-date technologies of their time, from the structural engineering of the buttresses to the stained-glass work, much of it featuring a distinctive “Chartres blue.”
