I.1.3
ENTRY OF THE SPECIALISTS
It was only natural that the Plan of St. Gall, once
published, should become an object of primary attraction
to the students of vernacular architecture who were not
slow in recognizing its signal importance for the history of
medieval house construction. This aspect of the Plan was
the concern of such men as J. R. Rahn (1876), Rudolf
Henning (1882), Julius von Schlosser (1889), Moriz Heyne
(1899-1903), Karl Gustav Stephani (1902-3), Christian
Rank (1907), Franz Oelmann (1923-24), H. Fiechter-Zollikofer
(1936), Otto Völkers (1937), and Karl Gruber
(1937 and 1952).[13]
Of deeper and even wider impact were the discussions
raised by the design of the Church and the claustral
structures of the Plan, as well as by certain discrepancies
between the drawing of the Church and the measurements
given in its explanatory titles. The literature of these
subjects has swollen into discouraging proportions. It
includes the writings of such men as: Hugo Graf (1892),
Georg Dehio (1892 and 1930), Wilhelm Effman (1899 and
1912), August Hardegger (1917 and 1922), Friedrich
Ostendorf (1922), Joseph Hecht (1928), Ernst Gall (1930),
Joseph Gantner (1936), Hans Reinhardt (1937, 1952, and
1962), Edgar Lehman (1938), Fritz Victor Arens (1938),
Otto Doppelfeld (1948 and 1957), Walter Boeckelmann
(1956), Wilhelm Rave (1956), Karl Gruber (1960), and
Wolfgang Schöne (1960). Landmarks in this sequence of
studies were the articles of Otto Doppelfeld (1948) and
Walter Boeckelmann (1956), each of which offered a new
solution to the difficult problem of the "dimensional
inconsistencies" of the Plan. Less successful were Wolfgang
Schöne's (1960) and Adolf Reinle's (1963-64) attempts
to settle this question.
The thorny problem of the origin of the cloister was
studied by Julius von Schlosser (1889), Joseph Fendel
(1927), and Ossa Raymond Sowers (1952). To add to these
names the countless references made by other authors who
addressed themselves to various aspects of the Plan in studies
not specifically devoted to this subject would be a
hopeless and unrewarding task.
An indispensable reference work that no student of the
Plan can by-pass is Hermann Wartmann's exhaustive
publication of the documentary sources of St. Gall (186392).[14]
An informative review of the economic history of St.
Gall, based on this material, is Hermann Bikel's Wirtschaftsverhältnisse
des Klosters St. Gallen;[15]
a valuable
study of the monastery's literary and scriptorial activities is
J. M. Clark's The Abbey of St. Gall, as a Centre of Literature
and Art.[16]
