EPILOGUE
Superbly executed, and possibly the most accomplished architectural creation of the age of
Charlemagne, the Plan of St. Gall owes its existence to a striving for cultural unity that pervaded the whole of
Carolingian life: unity embodied in a common language, Latin; a common belief, Christianity; a common legal and spiritual
authority vested in the offices of Emperor and Pope; and unity of monastic custom and observance.
It was the search for unity in the conduct of monastic practice—unitas regulae—that by inner necessity also required
creation of an ideal scheme to standardize and guide monastic architecture for the future. That scheme is transmitted to
us in the Plan of St. Gall.
In the new agricultural society that arose north of the Alps the monastery acquired the structure of a vast manorial
estate, including within the monastic enceinte a large contingent of serfs and workmen. This development called for the
establishment of an inner fortress, in which the monks could perform their spiritual offices without being exposed to
contamination by the secular world. The need for such segregation led to the adoption of the four-cornered cloister as a
standard form of monastic housing.
The architectural formula selected to assure this protection—together with that of the church, with which it now
entered into a lasting symbiosis—was Late Antique, but antiquity reshaped in the very process of its revival along
modular spatial concepts that had roots in the North, and harbored the germ for development of an architectural style
(Romanesque and Gothic) without precedent in the Greek, Roman, or Christian worlds.
One of the most striking qualities of the plan that emerged from these historical preconditions is that, although aimed
at the ideal, its features were governed by an overriding awareness of function: the assurance of architectural proximity
where proximity was dictated by need, of separation where separation was a spiritual imperative, of scaling of each
structure to dimensions not larger, but never smaller than required by its intended use.
This acute assessment of the monastery's functional parameters determined that the architectural scheme of the Plan
of St. Gall would exert lasting influence on the future, allowing it to survive under the stress of changes never foreseen
in the original concept.
The layout of the claustral ranges delineated on the Plan of St. Gall was of monumental simplicity: three masonry
buildings of virtually identical length and width, ranged in U-formation around a large open court that was closed on
its fourth side by the massive bulk of the church. These structures were double-storied but otherwise internally
undivided.
In subsequent centuries the dramatic simplicity of this concept was marred by insertion of a chapter house and other
unexpected additions that forced extension of the east and west ranges beyond the boundaries of the cloister square.
The claustral scheme was exposed to further stress when the Cistercians, in re-evaluating manual labor as being a
proper monastic occupation, drew their entire agricultural work force into housing in the west range of the cloister
square. This intrusion of lay brothers into the claustral compound produced a chain reaction in the repartitioning of
space, which could forever have destroyed the unity of the claustral scheme had it not been safeguarded by the ingenuity
of extraordinary modifications: the creation of supplementary spaces in the south range by swinging the refectory
around so as to face the cloister with one narrow end; the use of the same kitchen for both lay brothers and monks;
and the extension of both eastern and western ranges even further beyond the boundaries of the cloister square. In the
grouping of the primary building masses around an open inner court, the original concept still prevailed, but the
philosophical integrity of claustral seclusion was shattered by installation of lay brothers in one of the primary cloister
wings. The artificial partition of the cloister yard into a primary area for monks, and a narrow lane for lay brothers
destroyed aesthetically as well as ideologically the conceptual unity of the original scheme. In the pursuit of these new
goals the church fared no better. Bisected into two visually segregated areas, one for monks, the other for lay brothers,
it lost the unitary beauty of which it was possessed in Carolingian and pre-Cistercian times.
These modifications reflected both an internal change in the relation of monks to lay brothers, as well as a fundamental
change in the relation between monk and society. Under the Carolingian rulers, the monastery had become an
integral part of the agricultural, administrative, and educational fabric of the state. Its economic structure was such as
to guarantee not only the physical sustenance of its own people but also to contribute to the livelihood of thousands, if
not tens of thousands of secular men and women who lived on the monastery's outlying estates, and paid for that
privilege through services rendered in labor and/or the delivery to the abbot of a tenth of their agricultural produce.
The Cistercians, by contrast, tilled their land with their own work force, now installed in the cloister itself or within
walled enclosures of outlying granges. The Order received from these establishments not merely a percentage of their
production, but all of it. This quickly led to great monastic riches, but it lifted the monastery out of the social fabric
state, and in this manner contributed to its own eventual, inevitable, alienation.
