Romanesque Churches in the Bourbonnais

In representing the phenomenon known as "Romanesque," traditional scholarship has privileged verbal narrative -- the story of the "white mantle of churches" spread across the varied landscape and political division of Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In the central France region, this "mantle" is particularly evident since the area fell into economic decline in teh subsequent "Gothic period, and the old churches were left largely unmodified surviving in their hundreds down to the present day.

Two other strategies have been applied in the past to the representation of the churches: publications known as the Statistique monumental and Voyage pittoresque. The former constitutes a kind of dictionary of churches each represented with a small plan, a couple of black-and-white photographs and a short descriptive text. The reader may turn the pages and explore several hundred edifices; however each monument remains isolated: dead on the page. The Voyage, on the other hand, combines story telling with what were, in the 1830s, "high-tech" architectural images, generated through the new medium of lithography. The lithographic prints are large and luminous, giving a lively sense of the space, light and texture of the monument, almost as if one were actually there.

This project combines characteristics of each mode of representation. Thus, a website allows churches to be found alphabetically or spatially, by typing a name or by moving the cursor over a map where the churches are represented with accurate small-scale plans. This spatial experience is sustained in the graphic representation of the churches, all of which can be visited through QuickTime Virtual Reality panoramas. For a dozen churches we have also prepared complete three-dimensional models created through the use of a laser Cyrax scanner.

In some respects, we can leapfrog traditional representation entirely. Thus, the church plans (many of them measured in the field) are presented on the same scale: they can be overlaid in roder to explore common dimensional patterns. A shape recognition device allows the suer to play with the form of each plan, exploring the use of squares and rectangles. The parametric modeling system allows a more global comparison of plans, documenting statistically those nave spaces that approximate to a golden section rectangle or to a triple square (long, narrow naves are common in the region).

This project, developed with teams of student helpers in the framework of a summer field school, thus brings the student to the monument with new questions, new techniques and new enthusiasm. Conversely, it brings the monument to the student not as a single isolated edifice, but as part of a much larger enterprise that can be understood as the production of space. It is only when we translate the old style-based thinking and language of art historians into new modes of representation that we can begin to grasp the complex relationships between architectural production and the creation of regional and supra-regional cultural identities.