The cathedral is in the High 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.

The remnant of the previous 10th-century Romanesque cathedral, known as the Basse Œuvre ("Lower Work"), still occupies the intended site of the nave.

Work was begun in 1225 under count-bishop Milo of Nanteuil, with funding from his family, immediately after the third in a series of fires in the old wooden-roofed basilica, which had reconsecrated its altar only three years before the fire; the choir was completed in 1272, in two campaigns, with an interval (1232–38) owing to a funding crisis provoked by a struggle with Louis IX.

[5] Under Bishop Guillaume de Grez,[6] an extra 4.9 m was added to the height, to make it the highest-vaulted cathedral in Europe.

[8] 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.

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.

To him also is due some of the stained glass in St-Etienne, the second church of the town, and an interesting example of the transition stage between the Gothic and the Renaissance styles.

During the Middle Ages, on January 14, the Feast of Asses was annually celebrated in Beauvais Cathedral, in commemoration of the Flight into Egypt.

In the race to build the tallest cathedral in the 13th century, the builders of Saint-Pierre de Beauvais pushed technology to its limits.

[11] The accompanying photograph shows lateral iron supports between the flying buttresses; it is not known when these external tie rods were installed.

[13] This brace was installed as an emergency measure to give additional support to the pillars that, until now, have held up the tallest vault in the world.