flying buttress

I’ve recently been commissioned to do a drawing/painting (whichever works) of this church:

That’s just a sliver of it. It’s pretty big and all kinds of Gothic Revival fancy. I figured it would be a good warm-up for my long-awaited attempt at Ely Cathedral. I’m starting with a perspective drawing, so I need a ground plan to get the footprint.  To GoogleMaps!

The satellite photo gives a good idea of the footprint, though a bit messy from the blur and angle. I figured if I stared at it long enough, though, it would reveal some secrets.

Like if I put a rectangle around it and found the center…

My word! It’s the center of the church. BOOM.  Let’s split that up and find some more equal divisions.

WHAT’S THAT??? Dividing up those divisions reveals the shape of the central sanctuary and the little corner areas - all equal. I have no clue how architects do what they do but never expected such LOGIC.

Let’s make some more divisions in that complicated part on the right:

So now we can see the top of the bell tower is YET ANOTHER square the same size as those corner squares. There’s another one of those squares right at the end of the… apse? Ambulatory? Curvy end bit. And the diagonals even help space out the segments angling around. Flying buttresses right at the 45º!

Using that rectangle as a guide it was fairly straightforward to plot out a rough ground plan. Since I’m doing a drawing and not actually building a structure, it doesn’t have to be perfect, just give a clear idea of where everything sits:

Luckily I’ve got photos of the elevation drawings (nice of them to hang them in their fellowship hall) so the next step will be drawing up the basic structure in perspective.  I’m tempted to do a rough 3D version in Google SketchUp to experiment with viewing angles, just so I don’t waste a lot of time (and paper) getting that right.