Architect in Middle Ages. By Camilla Floriano

http://www.onetruemedia.com/shared?p=7777c855761a0607662015&skin_id=701&utm_source=otm&utm_medium=text_url

 

 

Castles, cathedrals, and huts of the peasants are the buildings we are most common with the Middle Ages, but there was a great variety of other buildings constructed as well. Wharves, warehouses, workshops, mills, townhouses, farmhouses, barns, and public works such as bridges and city walls were all vital parts of Medeival Europe. But, the romantic appeal of castles and the inspiring size of the great cathedrals have assured those structures a marked place in the modern view of the Middle Ages and its buildings. Besides the visual and emotional appeal of castles and cathedrals, another equally important factor that has shaped our image of medeival buildings is the passage of time and the toll it has taken on these buildings, especially on the more mundane ones. Many of those buildings have been demolished, disappearing without a trace, except for the vestiges of their foundations or a glimpse provided by some old illustration. A few, though have survived, they have been used continously, since they were built and have been renovated and remodeled so many times and for so many different purposes that it is often very difficult to accurately discern their original shape and, in a few cases, purpose. Therefor, the disproportionally high number of major edifices such as castles and cathedrals that have survived to the present relatively intact, combined with the near extinction of the other buildings, especially the houses of ordinary medeival citizens, have contributed to the misconceptions about medeival living. For example, compared to the total number of houses that were built over the course of the Middle Ages, extremely few houses have survived to the present. Most houses were constructed primarily of wood and now all that is left of most of these buildings are tracings of foundations and the post holes, which are holes that contain the wooden posts or beams that made up the foundation of the building. The lack of more substantial evidence has left us with an immense gap in our view of the Middle Ages, a gap which has all too often been filled by the worst imaginings of a landscape dotted with wrecthed huts and hovels and of towns and cities crowded with shanties and lean-tos of the shoddiest and most haphazard construction. Picturing these imaginings, some people have thus concluded that the bulk of the population during the Middle Ages lived in sloppy dwellings that quickly disappeared without a trace. While some wretched houses certainly existed, the surviving examples and contemporary illustrations of medeival architecture suggest a different picture, one in which most houses and other buildings were solid and well built. Though some people in the Middle Ages were homeless or lived in soundless conditions, many homes, while far from palatial, were sound and substantial buildings and quite fit for human habitation in their day. As with houses, workshops, forges, kilns, and mills also have had a low survival rate, which contributes to a distorted view of medieval technology and commerce. While these industrial sites may not have been as large and productive as modern factories, they were still well developed production as modern factories, centers that provided a wide range of manufactured goods, includings clay pots, wooden barrels, swords, armor, household cutlery, furniture, and cloth. Producing all these items required a sophisticated infrastructure to supply the necessary raw and finished materials to the specialized craftsmen who satisfied the varied needs of the medieval consumers.

While building styles differed across medeival Europe and evolved over the course of the Middle Ages, the basic techniques and building materials were fairly normal. The difficulty of moving large volumes of construction materials, especially overland, meant that the abundance or scarcity of some buildings materials near the construction site often dictated which materials used. As they had been for centuries before and would be for centuries after the Middle Ages, stone, mortar, wood, metal, and clay were the primary materials for constructing buildings. Reinforced and pre-stressed concrete, steel girder construction, and the host of synthetic materials now commonly in use did not begin appearing until the 19th century. Still, as the number of significant ruins as well as intect structures support, medeival Europeans were quite as capable as the Romans of constructing beautiful and enduring buildings using and combining the basic elements available.

Wood, was the most common building material in the Middle Ages. With the exception of the lands immediately surrounding the Mediterrean, much of medeival Europe was covered in thick forests that provided a seemingly inexhaustible supply of timber, though population growth and centuries of building did deplete many forests, especially those nearest population centers. And all buildings used wood in some capacity. Many buildings were constructed almost entirely out of wood, from the framing for their walls and roofs to their siding and shingles. And even stone buildings required wooden construction both while being built, in the form of scaffloding, ramps, and frames to support arches until the mortar hardened, and in their final forms for fixtures such as floors, roof beams, window frames, doors, and some interior walls.

Clay, was used in a variety of ways in medeival construction. It was used to fill in cracks and gaps in wooden buildings to make them less drafty, in the same way that American pioneers filled the gaps and cracks in log cabins with clay or sod. Clay was also used to coat panels of wattle. The clay was usually mixed with other materials such as chopped straw and cow hairs to create a substance called daub. The coating of daub made the wattle more weather and draft-proof and had the added casual benefit of making the wattle slighty less vulnerable to fire, an important consideration when all heating, cooking, and artificial lighting was achieved by use of open flames. The daub was applied to the panels of wattle after the panels were constructed with the gridworks of beams that formed the walls of wooden buildings. Clay was also formed and baked to create bricks, a popular building material throughtout Europe, out especially in the Low Countries where stone suitable for building was in very short supply. In fact, this scarcity of stone caused the inhabitants of the Low Countries to be among the first Europeans to build castles almost entirely out of brick. Though somewhat less durable than many stone castles, these brick castles were as fireproof as stone ones.

Because of its durability, stone was the prefered building material. In many places, houses, churches, and other buildings were constructed of whatever types and sizes of stone was at hand, regardless of whether the stone was well suited for use in building or not. When using the stones gathered from around a building site and its immediate vicinity, stone masons used a technique called random rubble building in which they constructed the walls of the structure by carefully fitting and mortaring the rocks of random shape and size together. Some of the stones, such as those that formed window or door frames or the outside corners and edges of the building were dressed, but most were left rough and irregularly shaped with no two looking the same; hence the name random rubble. In addition to the primary building materials of wood, clay, and stone, several other materials were needed to construct buildings. While they were used in relatively small quantities, these materials were essential in making the completed building fit for habitation. Many large construction projects had temporary iron forges opened on site to make and repair tools as well as fasteners and other metal objects, such as hinges, that became part of the building. In some areas, most notably Italy, France, and the Byzantine Empire, smoths were already making iron rods for reinforcing stone buildings as early as the 12th century. These rods were typically secured at the bases of arches, connecting across the span of the arches to provide additional stability by tying the bases of the arches together. While some of the tie-rods and tie-beams may have been intended only as temporary measures to provide added stability until the mortar thoroughly set and the building had settled, the long-term effectiveness of such reinforcement was graphically proven earlier this century in France. A church at St.Quentin had many of the iron tie-rods removed from its arches during restoration in the 19th century. After the church was shelled during World War I, only those arches that still had their centuries-old tie-rods were still standing. Similar results have been seen in Italy and in the areas of Greece and Turkey formerly ruled by theByzantines where medeival buildings with timber or iron reinforced arches have proven more resistant than unreinforced arches to the stresses caused by earthquakes. Some medeival buildings such as palaces, monasteries, and some houses in the cities did have plumbing systems with leaden pipes and bronze taps that provided running water. A few even had boilers to provide flowing hot water. These buildings also usually had sanitation systems, including indoor latrines. However, many buildings, including most private residences, didn’t have these features and their occupants had to draw and carry their water from wells and rivers. If they needed hot water, they had to heat it up in a cauldron or in another large cooking pot. As for waste removal, they had to use outhouses or, in towns and cities, communal latrines rather than en suite facilities. Thus, in those buildings in which plumbing was minimal or nonexistent, the residents relied on picthers, pans, wooden tubs, and buckets rather than on permanent fixtures such as water faucets, sinks, and bathtubs for conveying and containing the water needed for cooking and cleaning. Heating buildings was a chronic problem in the Middle Ages. The Roman technique of constructing raised flooring and using the space underneath the floor as a conduit for warm air from furnaces disappeared with the collapse of the Empire. In most of Europe, people resorted to using braziers, open hearths, or fire-pits constructed in the middle of the ground floor. Drafts through the buildings appear to have prevented dangerous accumulations of carbon monoxide, and smoke from the fires filtered out of the building through a hole in the ridge of the roof. These vents were often fitted with louvered caps on the outside of the roof to keep the rain and wind out. Some of these caps were wooden but others were made of pottery and at least a few English pottery smoke vent caps that have survived from the 13th century are in the form of human heads with holes in the mouth, eyes, and ears to allow the smoke to escape. Regardless of their form, such vents were of limited use in clearing the smoke out of the building since they lacked a chimney to contain and guide the smoke from the fire to the outside. To fix this problem, medeival builders developed smoke hoods to catch the smoke and direct it out of the building. These hoods functioned and looked something like the vent hoods currently found in most kitchens over the range-top except, instead of being made of metal they were made of wood or wattle and covered in plaster to make them less flammable. However, they improved ventilation and increasing use of fireproof materials meant that buildings could be built with several fireplaces instead of a single central open hearth, thus compensating for lost heating. Despite these improvements over the course of the Middle Ages, Europe would have to wait until the 19th century for the development of central heating systems that finally passed those of the Romans.

Of all the thousands of structures built in medeival Europe, only a small percentage have been preserved. Wars, fires, and simply the passage of the centuries have all taken their toll. Houses, for example are among the most under-represented buildings in terms of numbers of survivals from the Middle Ages. No medeival landscape is imagined as complete without a castle, a massive stone structure with many high towers, a drawbridge, a moat, and thick walls topped with battlements. Still, most castles built in the Middle Ages were far humbler buildings, with quite a few made entirely of wood, especially during the first half of the Middle Ages. Of all the materials used,a ll castles served he dual functions of providing a home for a noble household while also serving as a military stronghold for both defensive and offensive purposes. Despite their very different forms and purposes, medeival castles and cathedrals shared some common ground. Both were the result of massive building programs that required careful planning and great expenditures of capital and labor. Thus, there were some similarities in how they were built. Another aspect shared was more common ground in the employement of internationally renowed architects. One example was Master James of St.George. In the 13th century, Master James designe and supervised the construction of castles for the count of Savoy until he was hired away by Edward I of England to oversee Edward’s ambitious castle building program in recently conquered Wales. Similarly, architects were bought in all the way from Italy to design and supervise the building of the great churches of 15th century Moscow.

 

 

 

~ by camillssa on November 24, 2008.