As someone who enjoys developing stories, I find it interesting and essential to my process to bring them to life in drawings and other media. I am currently working on a story that takes place in a medieval world with elements of fantasy as well. Large sections of this story occur in a monastery for a religion that strongly parallels Christianity in its monotheism and good-natured deity, but I have tweaked the religion and its rituals to fit with its different world.
In early medieval art, I was captivated by the central plan church because it is an artifact of the past that we no longer seem to create. It was for this reason that I wanted the church for this monastery to have a central plan. However, I ran into a problem very soon after beginning my research – all the monasteries I found featured basilica plan churches and rectangular cloisters. The solution to this central plan monastery problem became the early focus of my conceptual designs.
After rationalizing the central plan, I returned to designing the compound. I looked at the facilities of the idealized St. Gall plan as well as the monastery at Cluny, and managed to find a copy of “The History of Romanesque Cluny as Clarified by Excavation and Comparisons” by K.J. Conant. These resources allowed me to get a sense of what facilities and resources were available inside these compounds as well as where buildings were located in relation to the church. Early designs placed the central church in a rectangular or circular wall with four-sided cloisters and buildings surrounding it.
Immediately after this, I began to think about crop circles and how some people suspect that aliens played a hand in early human development. Instead of leaving this as just theory, I decided to give it some “evidence” by looking at crop circles as an inspiration for a way to implement concentric circles into the plan. After some furious sketching, I arrived at a ground plan and I turned my attention to the plan of the church building itself.
After tweaking the direct crop circle adaptation using some basic numbers, I arrived at my latest plan; five outer buildings/chapel, four groups of outer church columns, three inner church columns, one dome, and various other numbers in different places throughout the compound. I also chose to find a way to elegantly incorporate other traditional elements of medieval churches, like the atrium and the narthex, seemingly referred to as a “galilee” in Conant’s writing. Plans for monks’ rooms and the “nave” elevation began to develop here as well.
It was at this point that I decided to formalize things a bit. Instead of freehanding, I brought out my trusty ruler and began marking down meticulously the positions of buildings, what they contained, where the church pillars would go, everything. The placement of the monastery’s incredibly extensive library in the triforium is particularly important, as it speaks to the importance of knowledge in this religion as well as the library’s prominence in the area.
Many artists I’ve encountered are afraid of math, but without it, much of my art would be lost. This page is something several people have said is almost a piece of art on its own, with all its meticulous yet wild calculations. Having figured out the main monastery portion of the compound, I turned my attention to the outside. Further utilizing the crop circle motif, I added in the guest housing and outer wall. I also decided how tall each building in the monastery would be.
In further reading of Conant’s article and Marilyn Stokstad’s Medieval Art textbook, both of the scholars spoke to the development of the basilica plan transept as a practical development, necessary to allow room for monks and other more “elite” members of the faith to worship as well as separate them from the common man. Also, Conant writes that “the long naves of Cluniac churches were chiefly for processions – a notable part of the Cluniac monastic liturgy.” (Conant, 14) Settling on this interpretation, I turned back to the liturgical use of the church.
The use in Catholic churches of a single rectangular altar and a single clergyman did not, in my opinion, suit the central plan church and may have been part of why the plan fell out of favor. Also, I felt that the use of an altar in a church was too Judeo-Christian and I sought another object for the Chosen to use as a focus of their worship. For this, I decided on an obelisk, and a ritual involving three “clergymen” (women are not excluded from priestly service in the Chosen religion) standing on a raised circular platform in the center of the church. The religious and the faithful proceed around the church’s ambulatory, staying on the ground level. I imagine their ritual to be something like a Catholic rosary, allowing for meditation during the service.
The last architectural decision I made was to use buttresses and flying buttresses, making this not only a central plan church, but a central plan Gothic church. The extra support would also be needed to hold up the church’s dome over the obelisk.
With all these elements in place, the monastery planning was almost finished. The next step was to create the cross sections and what a section of the church would look like from the outside. I tried to add in how the buttresses would look, and I settled on a plan and took my drawings to the computer.
From this point on, my work became almost exclusively digital. In 3D modeling software, I used the drawings to build the church from the ground up as it was drawn before. After building the walls and tweaking the buttress design after doing a little bit more research, I was starting to get somewhere. I was initially planning on only blocking out some of the building in 3D and using that as a reference from which to draw the whole thing, but after I placed a stone texture on the walls and a tile texture on the roof, I began to really like the way the model looked. I placed a dome of glass on top of the church to make the obelisk visible to approaching pilgrims. I was very pleased with my progress.
Then I did some more research. I learned that there was no way that my buttress arrangement, number, or anything made any sense. I was well into the project and I learned that my church would fall down. Thankfully, I wasn’t building this church in real life for it to collapse down on my workers. It turned out there was a really big gap between my visual vocabulary and the real architecture of gothic churches, including how and why they stood.
Is was here that Doctors Katarina and Roger Ray from the Toledo area visited our class. Their question and answer session proved to be a great help. I finally understood the importance of groin vaults and knew that I had to not only incorporate them, but change the entire pillar layout to make them plausible. The careful number usage from before was all but cast aside, but if it meant the church could “stand,” then I was all for it.
On the heels of this we viewed PBS's Cathedral video in class. That really shed light on the process of building these churches and the concept of the churches as essentially stone skeletons that allowed for flimsier walls made mostly of glass. It was this revelation that sent me back to the three-dimensional drawing board.
I started with the dome supporting pillars in the center and the buttressing pillars that would share that weight load. Then, I just kept adding more pillars as I felt I needed to support the rest of the church, keeping things evenly distributed around the building instead of odd numbers of supports like I’d had previously. I decided to use barrel vaults for the outer two ambulatories since they were either the outermost, and therefore only ceilings, or buttressed ceilings. The innermost ambulatory utilized a 5-rib groin vault like the one used in the apse of San Denis. The dome and its framework remained, but I needed to remake the stone supports it had from the previous version.
The final creative development came upon discovering online a picture of the labyrinth on the floor of Amiens Cathedral. The religious ritual finally clicked. There would be two doors – one in and the other out of the church being at each end of the labyrinth’s path.
