V. 4
CRITERIA OF RECONSTRUCTION
I
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).
V.4.2
SUPPORTING FRAME OF TIMBER
AND WALLS
The crucial constructional trait of the building tradition
to which the guest and service structures of the Plan of
St. Gall belong is that in this family of houses the roof
received its main support from two rows of freestanding
wooden posts, which divided the building lengthwise into
a nave and two accompanying aisles. The rafters of the
roof had their footing in a course of horizontal logs (plates)
which were held in place by a peripheral row of outer posts,
shorter and not as sturdy as the principal posts. The walls
had, in general, no load-bearing function, and were often
entirely independent from the outer posts. The predominant
material was wattlework, daubed with clay or animal
manure, but there is also clear evidence for vertical and
horizontal weatherboarding. We show as a typical example
of the former a reconstruction of House III of the ninth-century
fortified settlement of Husterknupp in the lower
reaches of the river Rhine (fig. 337),[183]
and as an example of
the second, a reconstruction of a house of the Stellerburg
in Dithmarschen, Germany (fig. 338)[184]
—both dating from
the ninth century. Walls built of earth or turves, as they were
sporadically encountered by van Giffen both in Iron Age
houses and in the early Middle Ages,[185]
are possible, yet not
very likely, in the sophisticated context of a paradigmatic
Carolingian monastery. Log construction is rare, practically
nonexistent, in the time and the territories with which we
are concerned.
[186]
If in our reconstruction of the guest and
service buildings of the Plan of St. Gall we have decided
on daubed wattlework in preference to other solutions, we
have done so not only because the excavations show it to
be the most common method of building walls in early
medieval and protohistoric times—(it might be recalled in
this context that the German word for wall,
Wand, comes
from
winden, "to wind" or "to braid")—but also because
it is still today in vast areas of central and western Europe
the preferred method of constructing infillings for the walls
of timber framed houses.
Since in the majority of the St. Gall houses the central
hearth is the only available source of heat for the entire
building, the peripheral spaces cannot have been completely
screened off from the central hall of the house. Like the
Bajuvarian standard house (fig. 289),[187]
the St. Gall house
was still essentially a unitary structure. In some houses,
however, where there are special corner fireplaces installed
in peripheral rooms the separation could have been more
rigid.[188]
While the literary and archaeological parallels adduced
in the preceding chapter leave no doubt that the traditional
material used in the family of houses to which the guest and
service structures of the Plan of St. Gall belong was timber,
masonry construction cannot be entirely excluded. The
foundations from which the timbers rose, and in certain
cases even the walls or certain component parts of the walls,
may have been built in stone. This would have been
especially desirable for the sake of fire protection in houses
which, in addition to the central hearth, had corner fireplaces
in some of their peripheral rooms. The House for
Distinguished Guests and the House for Bloodletting with
four corner fireplaces each are first in line for such consideration
(see below, figs. 397 and 416). Other houses may
have been built in a mixed technique, such as the House of
the Physicians (fig. 410), where the safety of the rooms with
corner fireplaces may have called for masonry walls, while
the gable wall on the entrance side of the house could have
been timber-framed. We have reconstructed the House of
the Physicians in this manner in order to demonstrate this
possibility (figs. 413A-F). By no means, however, should
masonry walls be taken as a precondition for the presence
of corner fireplaces. Central and Northern Europe, as well
as England, are dotted even today with houses built entirely
of timber and yet equipped with wall and corner fireplaces
built in masonry. A striking historical example of this
combination is found in the February page of the Très
Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry (fig. 378). We demonstrate
this possibility in our reconstruction of the Gardener's
House (fig. 427). For the remainder, and this holds
true especially for all the houses that shelter animals and
their keepers, there is no need to consider anything else but
timber. The
Brevium exempla have taught us
[189]
that even
on the highest social level in the emperor's residencies on
his various estates, stone was the exceptional, timber the
commonly used, material.
V.4.3
UNCERTAINTIES ABOUT THE ROOF
Up to this point, we are on relatively safe ground. The
problem becomes more delicate as we turn from the supporting
members of the roof to the design of the roof itself.
Admittedly all the material evidence that has been brought
to light so far remains confined to those portions of the
building which stuck in the ground or reached vertically
from the floor level of the excavated house to an optimal
height of about 5 to 6 feet—as much as was buried in the
mound of earth and manure that was heaped upon the floor
of an abandoned house when a settlement had to be reconstructed
on higher ground because of the rising water
level. The roofs that lay above this survival level have
vanished entirely and so far no one has been lucky enough
to find a portion sufficiently large and sufficiently well
preserved to obtain some real assurance of the detail of its
constructional make-up. It is quite obvious that the two
rows of freestanding inner posts must have been connected
lengthwise and crosswise by means of plates and tie beams.
Without such connections the supporting frame could not
have withstood the load and thrust of the roof, and especially
not in those cases where the post stood not in the ground
but on stones or masonry bases[190]
—but whether the crossbeams
lay beneath the longitudinal timbers or above them
must remain conjecture. Wholly inexplicable, on the basis
of the archaeological material available at this date, is the
design of the roof itself.
Fortunately, however, this gap in the surviving body of
material evidence can be closed by the architectural historian
of the Middle Ages, who can adduce as supplementary
evidence the record of a group of aisled medieval halls
and barns in timber whose roofs survive.
[ILLUSTRATION]
335. ALBRECHT DÜRER. THE VILLAGE OF KALKREUTH
WATERCOLOR. CA. 1500, KUNSTHALLE, BREMEN BY COURTESY OF THE KUNSTHALLE, BREMEN
ORIGINAL 31.4CM WIDE, 21.6 CM HIGH
Most of the rural architecture of medieval Germany and the medieval Lowlands was destroyed in the ravages of the Thirty Years' War
(1618-1648) but its visual likeness and setting was recorded before that holocaust with great descriptive accuracy in superb watercolors by Dürer
(1471-1528), and in engravings after Peter Breugel the Elder (1525?-1569).
Settlements such as Kalkreuth, and the unnamed Dutch village shown at the right were, as architectural concepts and by their practical function
of virtually the same cast as the hamlet of Ezinge, itself some 1800-1900 years their elder, a reconstruction of which is shown in figure 295.
In all these settlements some of the houses were used to store the harvest, others for the accommodation under one roof of man and beasts.
The earliest surviving structures of this type date from the end of the fifteenth century, but the tradition remained unbroken. The Dutch and
German Lowlands are replete with buildings dating from the 17th and 18th centuries in which the former and his family live and sleep, even
today, under the same roof with the cattle and the harvest—hardly differing in some respects from the way their ancestors had done in the
medieval and protohistoric buildings discussed on p. 23ff.
Jan Jans's Landelijke Bouwkunst in Oost-Nederland, Enschede, 1967, is a fine record of this building tradition and a masterpiece of
architectural drafting. Das Bauernhaus im Deutschen Reich und seinem Grenzgebiete, 1906 (Verband Deutscher Architekten
und Ingenieurvereine) is a primary source for study of rural architecture in Germany. Helm, Das Bauernhaus im Gebiet der freien
Reichstadt Nurnberg, Berlin, 1940, has good architectural analysis of the south German material.
