FORTIFIED CHURCHES

Here is a new building type, fortified churches.

When in Croatia, we came upon this incredible example in Vrboska on the island of Hvar.  The name of the church is St. Mary of Mercy.  Formwise, at first there was the rectangular church. And then to fortify it, the curved towers were put on one end. And then the polygonal form was put on the other.

It was built in 1571. At that time, the Turks were plundering the villages along the coast. So they wanted to protect their cultural heritage, they built this fortified church.

I must have been asleep in history class when they presented fortified churches as a building type. That, or they did not present it at all, which I tend to believe is the case.

When you google fortified churches, of course a whole range of this building type comes up. Books have been written on fortified churches. And I only woke up to this fantastic form generator while on a bicycle in Croatia. I guess better late than never.

These pages have addressed fortification architecture. As we saw at the page MILITARY AXONOMETRIC, the design of forts was a precise endeavor. And the axonometric drawing projection was evolved during the design of forts.

My thumbnail drawing below is a distillation of the basic form. The curved towers recall for me Micky Mouse ears. The rectangular assemblage recall for me a Klee sort of modernism.  And the whole composition is almost beyond belief, even when you forget the date that it was built.

The door was locked and we could not get in.  So I don’t know how or if the interior spaces connect.  I would really like to know how the basic church form connects on the interior with the polygonal form;  the way they intersect at the corner, they may indeed not connect.

I think I’ll be doing more Transparent Drawings of fortified churches.