Mark the west end with a massive, towered block containing an entrance hall below and a chapel or gallery above, rising higher than the nave: a church in front of the church.
The Carolingian westwork, of which Corvey on the Weser is the best survivor, served liturgy and empire: an upper chapel, perhaps for the emperor, looking into the nave, with stair towers on either side. Romanesque builders reduced it to a pair of towers flanking a façade (the ancestor of the twin-towered Gothic west front) or kept it as a transverse block, as at Maria Laach.
Raise the central nave above the lean-to roofs of the aisles and pierce the upper walls with a row of windows, the clerestory, so that the middle of a wide hall is lit from high on both sides.
nave height ≈ 1½–2 × nave width; one window over each bay of the arcade
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.
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.
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
Where one nave vault spans two bays of the arcade, give the principal piers, which receive the vault, a heavier compound section with shafts running up the wall, and make the intermediate supports lighter: columns or simpler piers.
A–B–A (pier, column, pier) · or A–B–B–A in Saxon churches
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The westwork”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/rom-westwork. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.