UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies

Former CMRS Director Professor Patrick Geary (History, UCLA), and Professor Bernard Frischer, former UCLA professor and currently Director of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, were awarded a $1.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. They are producing a digital model of the “Plan of Saint Gall” which is an elaborate two-dimensional plan of a monastic complex completed sometime in the first quarter of the ninth century as well as an extensive database on all aspects of early medieval monastic culture. CMRS is the project’s administrative home, and the team of researchers working on the project occupies an office in the Center’s suite. Profs. Patrick Geary, Karl Brunner, Barbara Schedl, and Peter Erhart

Profs. Patrick Geary, Karl Brunner, Barbara Schedl, and Peter Erhart

Left to right: Prof. Patrick Geary (History, UCLA), Prof. Karl Brunner (Director, Institute for Historical Research, Vienna), Dr. Barbara Schedl (CMRS VR Coordinator, UCLA), and Dr. Peter Erhat (Associate Director, St. Gall Monastic Archives).

The Plan of St. Gall is the oldest surviving and most extraordinary visualization of a building complex produced in the Middle Ages. It contains 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.

Professors Geary and Frischer consider the plan less a practical architectural blueprint than a two-dimensional meditation on an ideal monastic community, created by monks who had some knowledge of architectural tradition and practical experience of building, but who also drew on learned traditions, monastic ideology, and second-hand knowledge (verbal and written) to imagine what a monastery might be. Rather than immediately attempting a virtual reconstruction of a monastic complex as it was intended to be, they will first create a virtual reality model of how the plan was made that will allow scholars and students to continue the process begun by the monks of imagining an ideal monastic community. The model will incorporate a detailed database of texts, objects, construction techniques, building materials, and the like that will allow one to trace the development of the plan and to experiment with different ways that the plan might have been further developed had it actually been used in constructing a monastic complex on the site of the monastery of St. Gall.

Professors Geary and Frischer spent a week at the Monastic Library Switzerland, where the plan has been since the ninth century, studying and photographing this extraordinary document. Over the next three years, a team of computer scientists at the University of Virginia will produce an extremely detailed virtual reality model of exactly how the plan came into existence while a team of UCLA graduate students under the direction of Professor Geary and Dr. Barbara Schedl, will create the elaborate Latin, German, and English database of texts, objects, and images covering every aspect of monastic culture, society, and economics in the ninth century. Ultimately, the model and database will provide students and scholars a unique tool with which to investigate medieval architecture and culture. UCLA students have a unique research and learning experience.

Dr. Barbara Schedl, far left, with graduate student research assistants working on the St. Gall plan at UCLA.

Explore the plan for St. Gall Abbey at the project's website: http://www.stgallplan.org. Download the St. Gall project brochure (PDF 676k) at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/projects/stgall_brochure.pdf.