INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME II
IN addition to the nuclear block of monastic buildings—the Church, the Cloister, the Novitiate and the Infirmary
—the Plan of St. Gall exhibits a host of subsidiary structures of a type that in the Middle Ages was as common to
secular life as it was indispensable to the economy of a monastic community. Thirty of the forty separate buildings
shown on the Plan are in this category (frontispiece). They can be classified by their respective functions:
1 Facilities for the reception of visitors: Hospice for Pilgrims and Paupers; House for Distinguished Guests; House for
the Emperor's Vassals; House for Servants from Outlying Estates and for Servants Travelling with the Emperor's
Court.
2 Medical facilities: House for Bloodletting; House of the Physicians.
3 Facilities for the education of students living outside the regular monastic discipline: Outer School; and Schoolmaster's
Lodging.
4 Industrial facilities: Great Collective Workshop; and House for Wheelwrights and Coopers.
5 Facilities for storing, milling, crushing and parching grain: Granary; Mill; Mortar; and Drying Kiln.
6 Facilities for baking and brewing: Monks' Bake and Brew House; Kitchen, Bake and Brew House for Pilgrims and
Paupers; Kitchen, Bake and Brew House for Distinguished Guests.
7 Facilities for gardening and for fruit growing: House of the Gardener and his Crew; Monks' Vegetable Garden; Monks'
Orchard; and the Medicinal Herb Garden.
8 Facilities for raising livestock and poultry: House for Horses and Oxen and their Keepers; House for Cows and Cowherds;
House for Brood Mares, Foals, and their Keepers, House for Goats and Goatherds; House for Swine and
Swineherds; House for Sheep and Shepherds; House of the Fowlkeepers; Hen House; and Goose House.
In turning from the study of the Church and the claustral complex to that of the monastery's guest and service
buildings we are stepping from the intensely studied precinct of ecclesiastical architecture into the less-known
territory of vernacular building. To determine the appearance of these buildings as three-dimensional entities,
as I have stated earlier in this study, would be a breakthrough both in illuminating the history of monastic building
and in contributing to our knowledge of the vernacular architecture of the period. It would visually reconstruct
the architectural panorama of virtually the entire Carolingian countryside.
I was asked to take on this task in 1963 when, in the planning sessions for the Council of Europe Exhibition
Karl der Grosse in Aachen, the desire was voiced that this display should include a model reconstruction of the
architecture shown on the Plan of St. Gall. Had I not been assured of the support of Ernest Born and his
associate Carl Bertil Lund (who did most of the architectural drafting required for this project) I could not have
accepted responsibility for this task. All of our reconstructions of individual buildings, published in these volumes,
are based on working drawings made for the Aachen model.
We are not, of course, the first to have tried our hand at such a reconstruction. The problems involved have
puzzled students of the Plan for over a century and led to a variety of fascinating and perplexing conjectures. In
reviewing these earlier attempts we are far from merely rendering a plain historiographical account. They strikingly
manifest how unstable are our cultural perspectives. Occasionally they alarmingly reveal how disciplinary bias
may distort historical inquiry.
In 1844 when this story began, the eyes of the learned world were turned toward the great achievements
of classical antiquity. All of the earlier students of the Plan inevitably reflected this overriding cultural preoccupation
by interpreting the guest and service buildings of the Plan of St. Gall in the light of Greco-Roman, Etruscan,
and even Near Eastern prototype forms. The sixth and seventh decade of the last century, by contrast, witnessed
a growing interest in Germanistic studies coupled with increasing curiosity about the vernacular architectural
traditions of the north. As was to be expected, this generated a variety of new interpretations, some clearly incompatible
with the views put forth by the classicists. The movement for Germanistic interpretation found strong
support, toward the close of the century, in a number of literary and philological studies devoted to the subject
of house construction (mainly by Scandinavian scholars), and reached its peak from 1930 onward in a veritable
flood of new archaeological discoveries in the pre- and protohistoric territories of Germany, Holland and the
Scandinavian countries, including such faraway places as Iceland and Greenland. The insights gained by the men
who conducted this work enable us to see the problem of the guest and service buildings of the Plan of St. Gall
in its proper historical perspective. But because their findings were published in journals that lay outside the
reading range of professional architectural historians of the Middle Ages, progress in interpreting the Plan was
impeded.
There have been other deterrents. For generations the history of architecture has been plagued by a peculiar
and seemingly ineradicable prejudice against the study of vernacular building. Because of this bias, vast gaps
exist where knowledge resulting from proper study would help us to solve our problems. Obviously our image of
the design of the guest and service buildings of the Plan of St. Gall depends on the analysis not only of their proto-and
prehistoric antecedents but also of their medieval derivative forms. A good deal of groundwork had to be
done in both fields. In the final analysis the guest and service buildings turned out to be a vital link between past
and present. They are the exponents of a building tradition which has its origins in the second millennium B.C.,
runs in an undisrupted flow through the entire transalpine history of medieval and modern Europe and has as
yet not reached its point of termination. A variety of fascinating modern survival forms affect the rural architecture
of even today.
It has been a refreshing and rewarding experience to close these historical gaps by moving simultaneously
into all of these fields. I shall not regret having had to cut the umbilical cord which tied me to ecclesiastical
architecture in order to find the time required to accomplish this task, nor deplore the delays it imposed on the
completion of this volume.
It is hardly necessary for me to re-emphasize, in the introduction to the second volume of this study of the
Plan of St. Gall, that although the history of architecture is my primary concern this inquiry is not confined to
architectural problems. My objective is to comprehend the whole of life of the people for which these buildings
were planned. This takes us into an analysis of the spectrum of monastic hospitality, the monastery's medical
practices, its share in the education of the secular world, its complex industrial activities (including the use of
water power for the milling and crushing of grain), monastic gardening and, last but not least, the monastery's
practices in the breeding and rearing of livestock.
