French Gothic architecture
The most famous examples of Gothic architecture are found in the Île-de-France and Champagne, but other French regions created their own original versions of the style. The Angevin Gothic style in the province of Anjou features a vaults with elegant decorative ribs, as well as very ornate columns. The style is found in the interior of Angers Cathedral (1032–1523), though many of the Gothic elements of the facade were replaced with Renaissance elements and towers. A very fine example of Angevin Gothic is found in the medieval Saint Jean Hospital in Angers, which now contains the Musée Jean-Lurçat, a museum of contemporary tapestries.
Gothic Revival architecture
In the United States, the first "Gothic stile" church (as opposed to churches with Gothic elements) was Trinity Church on the Green, New Haven, Connecticut. It was designed by the prominent American Architect Ithiel Town between 1812 and 1814, even while he was building his Federalist-style Center Church, New Haven right next to this radical new "Gothic-style" church. Its cornerstone was laid in 1814, and it was consecrated in 1816. It thus predates St Luke's Church, Chelsea, often said to be the first Gothic-revival church in London, by a decade. Though built of trap rock stone with arched windows and doors, parts of its Gothic tower and its battlements were wood. Gothic buildings were subsequently erected by Episcopal congregations in Connecticut at St. John's in Salisbury (1823), St. John's in Kent (1823–26), St. Andrew's in Marble Dale (1821–23). These were followed by Town's design for Christ Church Cathedral (Hartford, Connecticut) (1827), which incorporated Gothic elements such as buttresses into fabric of the church. St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Troy, New York, was constructed in 1827–1828 as an exact copy of the Town's design for Trinity Church, New Haven, but using local stone; due to changes in the original, St. Paul's is closer to Town's original design than Trinity itself. In the 1830s, architects began to copy specific English Gothic and Gothic Revival Churches, and these "mature Gothic Revival" buildings "made the domestic Gothic style architecture which preceded it seem primitive and old-fashioned". Since then, Gothic Revival architecture has spread to and across America.