Book Nook Cathedral

Product Details

The great Gothic cathedrals of Europe : Notre-Dame de Paris, Chartres, Cologne, Westminster Abbey, Salisbury  were built to produce a single, overwhelming effect: the feeling of being inside something that is larger than you, older than you, and operating according to principles you don't fully understand.

The pointed arches that seem to be reaching upward. The ribbed vaulting that distributes weight in ways that shouldn't work. The flying buttresses that look like the building is being held up by stone wings. The rose windows that flood the interior with colored light. The entire architectural vocabulary of the Gothic was designed to make a human body feel exactly the right combination of small and significant.

Magic Night takes that architecture and asks: what if it wasn't a church? What if it was the entry to something else  a throne room, a court of magic, a space where power operated under entirely different rules than the ones written on stone tablets?

The answer is this book nook. And the answer is extraordinary.

Every Detail of the Scene : 

The Roses: Red roses climb the exterior walls, coil around the iron gate, appear in the gargoyle niches at the spire crowns. In the Gothic tradition, the rose is a sacred symbol , Mary, beauty, the divine made visible. In the fantasy tradition, a rose always means something is about to happen. In Beauty and the Beast, the rose is a countdown. In A Court of Thorns and Roses, roses mark every threshold of consequence. Here, they mark the entrance to Magic Night and they are the most insistent thing in the scene.

The Dragons: At the apex of the gothic spires, two dragons are perched with their wings spread ,not gargoyles, not decorations, but something that chose to be here and could leave at any moment. In medieval cathedral iconography, grotesques and gargoyles were placed at height to ward off evil. These dragons ward off something else. Possibly visitors with insufficient imagination.

The Iron Gate: Across the entrance at street level, an elaborate iron gate with scrollwork and pointed finials,  the barrier between the exterior world and the interior world. The sign below it says "Go Back." The scene ahead makes that instruction impossible to follow.

The Crimson Throne: Visible through the arch at the end of the interior corridor, a red tufted throne glows in the warm LED light — the destination at the end of the path through the gate, through the arch, through the darkness. Someone sits there, or should. The throne is never accidentally empty.