This website is an extension of my PhD thesis about Gothic towers.

In the second part of my dissertation I attempted to reconstruct the process of a 15th-century tower construction, including the main auxiliary structures: scaffoldings and machinery. It is important to emphasise – as it is discussed in several papers written by Professor Norbert Nußbaum –, that the Gothic construction praxis cannot be generalised. While the forms could spread on paper or parchment, the technical details, solutions could not. Norbert Nußbaum distinguishes the expressions „entwerfen” and „planen”: the first means the invention of new forms, while the second the application of the new forms in practice, on a particular building. As a conclusion of the first part of my dissertation I tried to deduce from realised smaller towers how the new forms of the Viennese south tower were invented (entwerfen), while the drawing series in the second part is similar to the process how a mediaeval master builder made preparations to the construction using the plans (planen) with the notable difference that I dealt with the auxiliary structures, not with the buildings itself (of course this was the task of the mediaeval builder too). So not only I do not state that a particular tower was constructed this way, but I also do not state that Gothic towers were generally constructed this way: my drawing series illustrates a possible solution, based almost exclusively on contemporary sources. As far as I know a similar series of drawings about a Gothic tower’s construction – illustrating not only the tower, but also the auxiliary structures, based on historic sources – wasn’t published in the literature yet. The situation is different in south of the Alps: on the construction of Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence (the most thoroughly researched construction site of the history of architecture) several similar drawing series are available, not unrelated from the fact that a contemporary drawing collection about Brunelleschi’s machines also survived. My intention was to create the northern counterpart of the drawings describing the dome’s construction, and at the same time to suggest that the construction of great Gothic spires was, although in a different nature, a similarly significant achievement in engineering.