V.4.1
GENERAL SPATIAL COMPOSITION,
Having identified the historical building tradition to which
the guest and service buildings of the Plan of St. Gall
belong, we can now designate as a central hall the large
rectangular center space, which is common to all of its
variants and which is open to the roof and furnished with a
fireplace supplying the house with its warmth. The subsidiary
outer spaces, on the other hand, must be interpreted
as aisles or lean-to's added peripherally to one, two, three,
or all four sides of the hall. This suggests a variety of
elevations, the basic possibilities of which are illustrated in
figures 329-334.
In its simplest form the house is covered by a pitched
roof with gable walls on the narrow sides. Typical examples
of this basic form are the bath and kitchen houses of the
Novitiate and the Infirmary (fig. 329), consisting really of
two such spaces added one to the other. In the next stage,
an aisle is added to one side, necessitating a roof extension
over the aisle addition, as in the Annex to the Great Collective
Workshop (fig. 330). In the third stage, a second aisle
is added to the opposite side, requiring a roof extension
over this second aisle, as in the House of the Fowlkeeper
(fig. 331). In the fourth stage, the main space is surrounded
on three sides by peripheral spaces. This permits two
variants: in one of these one of the narrow sides of the
center space remains exposed and contains the entrance, as
in the House of the Physicians (fig. 332); in the other, this
function is performed by one of the long sides, as in the
Gardener's House (fig. 333). The roof over the lean-to, on
the narrow side of these houses, could either be a simple
extension of the aisle roofs with the upper portion of the
gable walls exposed, or it could be slanted up to the ridge
of the roof in the form of a hip, a constructionally superior
form (and in the case of larger houses almost a necessity)
because the rafters of the lean-to act as buttresses protecting
the main roof against longitudinal displacement. We have
demonstrated the first possibility in some of the smaller
houses, such as the House of the Physicians (fig. 332) and
the Gardener's House (fig. 333), but have adopted the
latter version for all of the larger houses of the Plan.
The range of the variants is complete with the addition
of another aisle or lean-to on the fourth side of the center
space (fig. 334). Thus the house attained the distinctive
silhouette so well known from drawings and engravings
of rural landscapes by Albrecht Dürer (fig. 335) and Peter
Bruegel the Elder (fig. 336).
