Educational Alternatives, Volume 21, 2023

Abstract: This paper aims to show how a historical innovative engineering achievement can be mediated visually without having to study the underlying mathematics. The current dissertation examines the history and construction of the four crossing towers that Cologne Cathedral has had in the course of its history. Although depicted in numerous illustrations of the past centuries, their concrete appearance remains largely hidden. Documents from the cathedral archives allow us to reconstruct both its construction and its appearance. In the process, discrepancies between construction planning and execution as well as between execution and seemingly detailed visual reproduction for the public come to light. Here, however, we are concerned with its penultimate and final version, built between 1848 and 1880 and then slightly altered after the destruction of the Second World War. This raises the question of whether its mid-twentieth-century form does not require a revision to its late-nineteenth- century completion in order not to resurrect the original appearance, a twelfth-century design after all, as the completion of this already infinite building site. An important argument is precisely that engineering innovation which made the form planned in the Middle Ages possible under the demands of the 20th century.