Rules · Roofs · Façades · Structure
Instead of a dome, crown the church with a tall octagonal pyramid of masonry (the shatyor, or tent) set on an octagon over the square body, with kokoshniki at the transitions and a small cupola at the top.
Ascension, Kolomenskoye (1532): ≈ 62 m high; cube → octagon → tent → cupola
The tented church translated into brick the steep timber towers of northern Russian carpentry. It has no interior dome: the tent rises as a hollow pyramid, open to the church below, whose narrow interior is a vertical shaft of space. Its outline, visible for miles along the river, made it a memorial and a landmark as much as a place of worship.
In the mid-seventeenth century the Church, under Patriarch Nikon, discouraged tents on parish churches in favour of domes, and the form survived mainly on bell towers and in timber building.
Lift the dome on a cylindrical or polygonal drum pierced with windows between the ring of the pendentives and the springing of the dome, to light the centre of the church and to make the dome visible from afar.
drum height ≈ ⅓–1 × its radius (Byzantine); much taller in Russian churches
Crown the four corner bays of a cross-in-square with smaller domes on drums around the great central dome, making a five-domed quincunx.
Lift each dome on a tall drum and give it a bulbous outer shell that swells beyond the drum and draws up to a point under the cross; build the shell as a light timber frame sheathed in metal over the structural vault below.
onion Ø ≈ 1.2–1.3 × drum Ø; height ≈ 2 × its base radius
Divide each wall into bays with pilaster strips and end each bay in a semicircular gable, the zakomara, that follows the curve of the barrel vault behind it; shape the roof to the gables.
usually 3 zakomary per façade, one per bay
Mount from the walls to the drum in stepped tiers of decorative gables with pointed ogee heads, the kokoshniki, each tier set back and narrower than the one below, so that the body of the church rises into its domes in a pyramid of arches.
Build the house of whole logs laid horizontally and notched into one another at the corners, their ends left projecting; stop the joints with moss; roof it with boards or birch bark on a steep pitch; raise the living room on a lower storey where the ground is damp.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The tented church”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/tented-roof. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.