French Gothic architecture

French Gothic architecture is marked above all by verticality, achieved through the rib vault, flying buttresses and other structural innovations that carried the weight of stone construction outward to exterior supports, allowing unprecedented height and volume and admitting larger windows that fill its cathedrals with light. The style emerged in the Ile-de-France region in 1140, when Abbot Suger began reconstructing the Basilica of Saint-Denis north of Paris, and it remained the dominant architectural style in France until the mid-sixteenth century, when it was gradually superseded by French Renaissance architecture. French scholars traditionally divide the style into four successive phases: Primary Gothic before 1140 to 1180, Classic Gothic from the 1180s to the early thirteenth century, Rayonnant from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century, and Flamboyant from the mid-fourteenth century onward, each marked by its own evolving structural and decorative innovations.