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.
The monastery arranged round the church
Put the church in the centre with its altar to the east; the cloister against its south side, ringed by dormitory, refectory and cellar; the abbot, the school and the guests to the north; the novices, the sick and the gardens to the east; the kitchens, workshops, mills, barns and animals to the south and west; the hospice for the poor by the entrance.
The Plan of St Gall groups buildings by who uses them and how close they must be to the church. The monks’ own buildings touch the church and each other round the cloister; buildings for outsiders stand beyond; service and farm buildings form an outer ring. The cloister is to the south of the church so that the church shelters it from the north and the sun reaches its walks.
The church itself is given, by inscription, a length of two hundred feet; it has apses at both ends and two free-standing round towers at the west, flanking a semicircular forecourt. Whether the plan was meant to be built as drawn is uncertain (the grid of the drawing and its written dimensions do not quite agree), but its zoning became the pattern of Benedictine and later Cistercian monasteries for centuries.
Related rules
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
Multiply altars at the east end by opening apses off the transept arms and the choir, stepped back from the main apse in echelon, each with its own small semidome and roof.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The monastery arranged round the church”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/st-gall-scheme. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.