The Plan of St. Gall: A Study of the Architecture & Economy of, & Life in a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery

by Walter William Horn, Ernest Born

Since 2005, CMRS at UCLA. has been the administrative home to the St. Gall project. It is now a produced in three large volumes. The project's departure point is an extraordinary drawing of an ideal monastery, known as the Plan of St. Gall. Created in the early ninth century, the Plan is the oldest surviving visualization of a building complex produced in the Middle Ages, containing ground plans for some forty buildings, ranging from a church, monastic school, abbot's residence, and infirmary, to such mundane elements as a water mill, stables, and poultry houses. The project has been generously supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the loveliest, most fascinating books I've ever come across in my lifetime. This one is close to the top in native appeal (to me) of the material, in aesthetic appeal of the book design, quality of the writing, and in academic substance. I wandered in to the Folio stacks in my university research library one day, prepped from my youth to be interested in the matter but with no other exposure to Horn and Born's work, and I'm not sure that it's at all an exaggeration to say that my life was changed by this work. If you can get your hands on a copy of it - well, don't. I still maintain to myself that I'll own a copy someday, and I could well do without competition from you.