I. 15
THE PROBLEM OF SCALE AND
FUNCTION
I.15.1
SCHEMATIC DRAWING OR
BUILDING PLAN?
The practical effect of the mensuration system employed
in the Plan of St. Gall was that it provided its users with a
scale that enabled them to convert the dimensions of each
building as shown on the parchment into the dimensions
which were to obtain on the ground with virtually no
margin of error. Ernest Born and I had ample opportunity
to test this aspect of the Plan, when preparing the working
drawings for the three-dimensional reconstruction of the
monastery and its buildings put on display in the Council
of Europe Exhibition "Charlemagne," at Aachen in the
summer of 1965.[391]
We encountered no major obstacles in
our task of converting its simple linear projection into
scale-true working drawings and these drawings would in
fact have been detailed enough to enable a modern team of
masons and carpenters to rebuild the monastery in its full
dimensions.
In this regard, namely the scale-consistent transferability
of its dimensions from parchment to ground, the Plan must
be defined as a building plan and not as a schematic drawing.[392]
One might, however, entertain some doubt as to
whether this definition can be applied with equal assurance
in other respects. It has been shown above[393]
that the Plan
leaves us in the dark about such important details as the
nature of the materials which were to be used in the construction
of individual buildings, the thickness of their
walls and such constructional details as would have had to
be defined had the walls been shown in thickness. This
leaves a vast body of unanswered technical questions,
especially tantalizing in the case of the guest and service
buildings, whose make-up has confused and puzzled
scholars for over a century. Yet here, in particular, we must
refrain from projecting our own historical ignorance into
the mind of the Carolingian mason or carpenter who studied
the Plan in preparing himself for a particular building
project. Our analysis of the guest and service buildings[394]
is
painful evidence of the fact that today we can identify the
design and constructional make-up of these buildings only
through a laborious process of historical research. A
Carolingian mason or master carpenter would have settled
this task instantaneously in a single intuitive response the
moment he laid eyes on the Plan, because he would have
recognized the building type as a variant of the house in
which he himself was born and lived, and could thus have
translated its design automatically into structural realities.
The excellent state of preservation of the Plan of St. Gall
suggests that it was rarely, if ever, carried to the building
site. Anyone who has been involved in building a house
knows to what wear and tear drawings used in actual construction
are exposed. It would be inclined to think that the
Plan of St. Gall never left the monastic library or the
abbot's reception room. Its primary practical function
probably was to form the basis for a vast body of verbal
building directives. It could also have served as the prototype
for many other necessary drawings, laid out at a larger
scale and in greater detail, which have not survived due to
attrition caused by their being used on the construction
site. I would consider it a highly hazardous historical inference
to conclude from the linear rendering of the walls
on the Plan of St. Gall that scale-consistent architectural
drawings defining walls in thickness and articulating other
structural details implicit in this type of rendering, did
not exist in Carolingian times.[395]
I believe that drawings
of this kind existed at all times, and would find it hard to
presume that a building as sophisticated as the Palace
Chapel at Aachen would have been constructed on purely
verbal directives, without the aid of detailed plans and
elevations.
A UNION OF SCHEMATISM & REALISM
In stressing the "realistic" aspects of the Plan of St.
Gall, however, I do not wish to convey the impression that
the Plan is entirely free of "schematicisms." The Plan is
schematic in many respects. It is schematic in that all of the
monastery's buildings are inscribed into a site of perfect
regularity: an oblong whose sides correspond to the proportion
3:4. It is schematic in the sense that this oblong is
divided into subordinate areas of comparable regularity
within which the houses are rigidly aligned, as in the layout
of the insulae of a Roman city—conditions, of course, that
in actual construction would have to be modified to adjust
to the topographical peculiarities of a given site. Again,
the Plan is schematic in the emphasis which it places on
modular relationship rather than straight numerical sequences.
The largeness of the standard module (2½ feet)
was bound to introduce a touch of geometric stylization in
the rendering of many of the smaller objects, whose normal
dimensions could only be expressed by using fractions
of modules. If the customary length of a Carolingian bed
was 6 feet and 4 inches (as is standard today), the drafter
of the Plan was faced with the alternatives of assigning it a
value of two modules, or 5 feet, (which would have made
the bed 16 inches too short for a fully grown man) or
assigning it a value of three modules, or 7½ feet, (which
made it 18 inches larger than necessary). In taking the
more generous alternative[396]
he not only protected the monks
from being crowded into beds where sleep would have been
a torture, but also provided the builder with a margin of
safety for the indispensable head- and footboards.
The size of the beds reveals a principle that can be observed
in many other areas of the Plan. Wherever the real
dimensions of a small object fell short of the standard
module of 2½ feet, the designer rounded such objects off
to the next higher module—never the lower one. This was
his method of making sure that a building, when actually
constructed, could in fact accommodate the appurtenances
with which it was to be equipped. It was his method, also,
of providing for a safety margin of space for the thickness
of the masonry walls, which on the Plan itself were rendered
as simple lines.
Because of the dimensional restraint that the largeness of
the standard module imposed upon the rendering of small
objects, the dimensions at this lower order of magnitude
must not be interpreted too literally. I am singling out as
another typical example the millstones (molae) in the Mill
(fig. 438). Their diameter of three standard modules (7½
feet) appears to be too large, even within the highly
advanced technology of a paradigmatic Carolingian monastery.
We cannot infer from the manner in which these
stones were drawn that they were meant to have had the
full diameter of 7½ feet. Their intended size could have
been at any reasonable point above two modules, or 5 feet,
and below three modules.[397]
There are other touches of
draftsmanship that are "schematic" rather than "realistic,"
such as the wide interstices between benches and
tables in the Monks' Refectory (fig. 211) and in the House
for Distinguished Guests (fig. 396).
Yet when allowance is made for all of these factors, full
emphasis must be placed on the observation that the Plan
is not schematic to the point that any of the practical
requirements of the buildings had to be sacrificed in order
to conform to overriding standards of modular geometricity.
In fact one of the most surprising and truly remarkable
features of the Plan is that despite its modular schematism
it is extremely "realistic"—realistic in the sense that the
dimensions of its rooms and installations are designed with
an acute awareness of the space needed to carry out their
designated function. In the copious literature on the Plan
of St. Gall this fact has been almost completely overlooked,
yet detailed analysis shows that wherever a building served
a practical function it was designed to be large enough to
guarantee that that function could be performed adequately.
Where it has been designed slightly larger than
required (in general by a carefully calculated fraction) the
space allowed is never blatantly excessive.
There is no doubt in my mind that the architect who
developed the scheme of the monastery based his work
upon a clearly formulated population plan and adhered to
this program with punctilious care as he worked out the
dimensions of the respective buildings. A count of the beds
of the monks and the various monastic officials discloses
that the monastery shown on the Plan of St. Gall was
designed to accommodate between 100 and 110 religiosi.[398]
There are two buildings on the Plan in which it had to be
possible for all of the monks (with the exception, perhaps,
of the few who were in charge of the novices) to assemble
at the same time. In both places the seating arrangement is
worked out to allow room for all of the brothers, leaving
some extra seats for visitors.
The normal sitting space required by a fully grown man
while eating at a table is an area 2½ feet wide; this is what
he would need today and what we can safely expect him to
have needed in the Middle Ages. At this ratio the benches
and tables in the Refectory (fig. 211) could seat a total of
120 monks.[399]
The Refectory, accordingly, can accommodate all of the
100 to 110 brothers in a single sitting and allow, in addition,
for an extra sixteen seats to take care of an unexpected
fluctuation, as well as the normal increase during the great
religious festivals of Christmas, Pentecost, and Easter when
the novices were permitted to join their elders. There is also
a table for visiting monks with a bench capable of seating
six; this corresponds exactly to the number of beds that
are shown in the lodging for the Visiting Monks.[400]
The same realistic awareness of spatial needs is disclosed
in the layout of the benches in the Church, on which the
monks were seated during the hours of divine services. The
long semicircular bench in the apse and the forechoir
seats forty-eight monks (fig. 99); sixteen monks can be
seated on the freestanding benches for specially trained
singers in the crossing; eighteen on the wall benches of the
southern transept arm; twenty on the wall benches of the
northern transept arm; and five on each of the two freestanding
benches of the transept arms. Total: 112.[401]
Another example of the draftsman's keen and consistent
apprehension of the spatial realities involved may be found
in the House for Distinguished Guests (fig. 396).[402]
The
number of toilet seats for servants in the House for
Distinguished Guests (again, providing for a sitting area of
2½ feet per person) is identical with the number of beds
that could be placed in the servants' sleeping quarters. The
bedrooms of the noblemen with private toilet facilities are
furnished with four beds at each end of the house. The two
stables for their horses under the northern aisle of the
house, each with a surface area of 30 × 12½ feet, can
accommodate four horses each, allowing in addition to the
required standing space sufficient extra space for taking the
horses in and out and for feeding them, yet not much more
than was needed for that purpose.
The same exacting attention to spatial needs can be
observed in the layout of the buildings that contain the
kitchens, the baths, the baking and brewing facilities,[403]
the
mills and the mortars—but most conspicuously in the layout
of the Monks' Dormitory. This building, as we have
seen,[404]
was designed to accommodate seventy-seven beds.
Its dimensions (85 × 40 feet) are calculated to perform
this task to perfection. Even the dimensions of the barrels in
the Monks' Cellar, as will be shown later on, are based on
an accurate statistical estimate of the annual storage needs
for alcoholic beverages proportionate to the community of
the size of the monastery shown on the Plan—as well as the
precise volume of cooperage required to meet these needs.[405]
