Southwest German Gothic plan views

Although architectural drawing as a medium gained enormous importance as an actual design instrument for the first time in the Gothic period, architectural history research is relatively isolated with regard to this medium. This is the only way to understand why the most recent summary on the subject of medieval architectural drawings merely perpetuates established but untenable clichés with regard to the question of scale and usability for the execution process. Moreover, since (almost) no Gothic building plans have survived from the area in which the Gothic period originated, as is the case in England, for example, the surviving stock in the German-speaking area is of crucial importance for analysing the design process in the late Middle Ages.

The starting point for the project, which was funded by the German Research Foundation, was the recording and publication of the extensive holdings of Gothic architectural drawings in the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the Städtisches Museum Wien, which today contain over 400 drawings, by far the largest proportion of the surviving architectural drawings (around 80 per cent of the world's holdings).