As the title. I was wandering around Dunfermline Abbey this afternoon, and it struck me that I've never seen a copy of anything like Medieval blueprints. Now, there must have been architects, or some equivalent building designer. And these buildings are vast enough to have required an awful lot of very detailed planning. So, did they have blueprints? How detailed were they? Did the architect (or whatever he was referred to as) know exactly how the end building would look?
Thanks!
Well not really construction drawings as you would expect today. But the designer would produce a sort of reference drawings.
Here's an example, from The Facade of Strasbourg Cathedral
http://blog.metmuseum.org/penandparchment/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/cat380r2_49f-211x300.jpg
The reason you haven't seen too many of them floating around is they're quite rare. I don't believe there's a single surviving architectural drawing from England dating before the 1500s.
For more of the intricate details, the window tracery for example, would be draw out at full scale for workers to build off.
The Architect (Mason as they were referred to at the time), would have most likely had a very good idea of what they wanted the final structure to look like, but chances are more than likely they would have died before the building was completed, leading to a new architect taking over.
In some cathedrals there's evidence of plaster floors being laid and used to draw on, sort of like a huge white board. It's believed that the plans created this way would be rough drawings later worked up on paper etc.
This is an interesting read - http://www.arct.cam.ac.uk/Downloads/ichs/vol-2-1579-1598-holton.pdf - and it talks about conclusions that can be made about masons' workspaces on page 14 of the document.
Have a look at this BBC video. I usually recommend this as introduction to high medieval cathedral building because it covers a lot of the first questions that pop into people's minds when they really start thinking about them.
With respect to /u/dspin153 's comment about plaster-floors-as-work-space, the video above visits one at 16:10.
It is difficult to explain the near utter absence of detailed plans: surely at some point portable drawings would have been used, rendered on parchment? It's possible that the parchment was scraped each time for new drawings (as happens frequently in manuscripts), and once the parchment became unusably thin and hole-ridden it was disposed of. But given the constant re-use of parchment in medieval manuscripts, some drawings of some sort should have come down to us? At least one from a 400-year span which bridges the plaster floors and the work site?
Well, we just don't know how much and where drawings were in fact used (whether plaster, parchment or other surface). But, we do know the construction methods. Is it possible that the method of construction itself may have actually displaced a lot of the drawings we would expect?
I've worked this year on restoration of high medieval bishop's palace, spending a lot of time very close to the original mason's work. There are a number of things that strikes one when staring at - and touching - these massive constructions for hours, days, weeks on end. The big one for me is that every single opening (whether Romanesque or Gothic arch) would have first been built 'in negative' in wood, and then the stone fitted and mortared around it. It is just possible, maybe, that the 'detail drawing' might in fact have been the wood structure itself, and then improvised thereupon in detail carvings.
