"Beauvais Cathedral"

The cathedral is in the Gothic style, and consists of a 13th-century choir, with an apse and seven polygonal apsidal chapels reached by an ambulatory, joined to a 16th-century transept. 

It has the highest Gothic choir in the world: 159 ft under vault.  From 1569 to 1573 the cathedral of Beauvais was, with its tower of 502 ft, the highest human construction of the world. Its designers had the ambition to make it the largest gothic cathedral in France ahead of Amiens. It is slightly taller than the nave of St Peter's Basilica in Rome at 152 ft.

The work was interrupted in 1284 by the collapse of some of the vaulting of the recently completed choir. This collapse has been seen as a disaster that produced a failure of nerve among the French masons working in Gothic style. The collapse also marked the beginning of an age of smaller structures generally, which was associated with demographic decline, the Hundred Years' War, and with the thirteenth century.

However, large-scale Gothic design continued, and the choir was rebuilt at the same height, albeit with more columns in the chevet and choir, converting the vaulting from quadripartite vaulting to sexpartite vaulting.  The transept was built from 1500 to 1548. In 1573, the fall of the 502 feet central tower stopped work again. The tower made the church the tallest structure in the world (1569–1573). Afterwards little structural addition was made.

The choir has always been wholeheartedly admired, with Eugène Viollet-le-Duc calling the Beauvais choir "the Parthenon of French Gothic." It inspired the main administration building of Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois, which has been the world's leading high-energy physics laboratory since the 1960s. The building is now called Wilson Hall after Robert R. Wilson, its founding director and a sculptor who insisted on an uplifting aesthetic.

Its façades, especially that on the south, exhibit all the richness of the late Gothic style. The carved wooden doors of both the north and the south portals are masterpieces, respectively, of Gothic and Renaissance workmanship. The church possesses an elaborate astronomical clock in neo-Gothic taste (1866) and tapestries of the 15th and 17th centuries, but its chief artistic treasures are stained glass windows of the 13th, 14th, and 16th centuries, the most beautiful of them from the hand of Renaissance artist Engrand Le Prince, a native of Beauvais.