Order the church as a single path: a colonnaded atrium, a narthex, the long nave drawn toward the altar, and the apse framed by a triumphal arch at the end of the axis.
One dormitory, next to the church
Let all the monks sleep in one place if their number allows, each in his own bed, clothed and ready to rise, with a light burning until morning; place the dormitory where they can go straight to the church for the night office.
The Rule wants the community to sleep together under the eye of the seniors, and to rise in the night for the office. The Plan of St Gall puts the dormitory over the warming room in the east range of the cloister, joined to the transept of the church, and nearly every later monastery kept that arrangement, often with a night stair leading straight down into the church.
Related rules
To make a square of half the area of another, join the mid-points of its sides: the rotated square so drawn has exactly half the area. Repeat to halve again.
side of inscribed square = s ⁄ √2 · area = ½ s²
End the choir in a semicircle of piers; wrap an aisle (the ambulatory) around it, and open a ring of chapels off the ambulatory, each with its own altar and windows, so that the east end steps down in tiers of roofs and buttresses.
Put the hall at the heart of the house and enter it at one end, by a passage running through the house from front door to back door, screened from the hall. Open the buttery, the pantry and, between them, the way to the kitchen off that passage, at the hall’s lower end; put the family’s parlour, and the great chamber over it, beyond the hall’s upper end, where the high table stands.
Lay out the church as an Early Christian basilica (a tall nave lit from above, lower aisles on either side, a sanctuary ending in an apse to the east) and cross it with a transept, so that the plan becomes a Latin cross with a tower over the crossing.
Let the square of the crossing set the measure of the whole church: the nave and transept arms are multiples of it, each nave bay is a square of the same size, and each aisle bay a square one quarter its area.
nave bay = crossing square; aisle bay = ¼ of it; nave length = n squares
Cite this page Chris Paton, “One dormitory, next to the church”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/benedict-dormitory. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.