Construction of a Gothic Church Tower: A 3D Visualisation Based on Drawn Sources and Contemporary Artefacts

Abstract

The construction of Gothic church towers with carved stone spires and often with significant height required the most advanced technology and financial support of their age, and the application of advanced machines was also inevitable for it. This article is an attempt to virtually reconstruct and visualise the process of a 15th-century tower construction, including the main auxiliary structures: scaffolding and machinery. A series of 3D models is created for that purpose, using the contemporary plans of the partly realised north tower of St. Stephen’s church in Vienna, the contemporary machine drawings of the Strasbourg-based master builder Hans Hammer, and contemporary and neo-Gothic drawings of scaffoldings together with survived exemplars as sources. An important question was whether medieval technical drawings contain enough data to model the structures or devices that they depict and if the construction process could be represented using them.