Split Personality

Live, from Montreal, the Cathedrale Marie Reine du Monde et Saint Jacques:

Putting aside the building’s architectural merit – and there is a great deal – I find this kind of church interesting structurally. We have at least three very different types of structure here. There’s the main body of the building, with widely-spaced bearing walls, interior columns, and a truss roof; there’s the narthex on the far left, with two bearing walls not far apart and probably supporting a single span of beams at each floor and roof level; and there’s the dome structure, which has some form of skeleton framing.

If you were building a modern church of the same architectural design, however unlikely that might be, you would probably use one form of structure across the whole building. In this case, we have multiple forms of structure based on the architecture of an individual piece of the building. Even if those structural forms are now out of date, adapting to the architecture seems like a better solution.