# Misadventures in Architecture



## DragonOfTheAerie (Aug 18, 2017)

I am the type of writer that is allllll about setting descriptions. Love them. It's important that my settings be detailed and accurately described. One of the main settings in my WIP is a huge, sprawling, glorified monastery type of place. I'm basing the architecture (a little loosely) on various cathedrals and churches, mostly of the Gothic sort, since I like high and pointy. 

I have a rough draft of a floorplan for this place, and a complete floorplan I can reference is going to be absolutely necessary. I've never had to actually design a building before. I also have never visited a cathedral or anything similar, so my experience is limited to wikipedia and youtube tours (often very incompetently filmed). As a result, i'm confused and stuck. 

(And sick of internet research. I only wrote 250 or so words last night, in part because it took me half an hour to find the word 'pilaster.')

Questions: 

Do those high, fancy towers not actually ever contain anything? What if I wanted to put rooms in a tower? (need someplace to put a remote secret room dangit; i have lots of remote secret rooms that have to go someplace remote and secret) Is that a castle instead? I can deal with hybridizing a cathedral and a castle or palace, this is 67% artistic license anyway, but an hour spent on the internet gives no answer as to how one would lay out the interior of a tower. All stairs and you could put a room at the top, or...I'm aware that real life brick/stone buildings where the walls are load bearing only can go 6 or 7 stories high at the most, but this place is probably magic and also Rule of Cool. 

Sorry if I sound insufferably stupid. I genuinely just don't want my book to sound insufferably stupid. 

Now what if you wanted to have something UNDERNEATH a tower? Is this structurally implausible? (i was an idiot and put one at the junction of two adjoining hallways and now i have no idea how one would access one of those fancy spiral staircases) (I probably will just have to redraw) (but where do I put that stupid tower) 

basically, how does stuff like this look like on the inside 

Sorry if these are dumb questions but yeah.


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## pmmg (Aug 18, 2017)

Whose to say yours does not?

I think if you are asking about the spires on a cathedral, I do think they tend to be empty, contain a stairs, or are a bell tower. I would suspect the Sistine Chapel has some secret rooms though. And a catacombs...


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## TheKillerBs (Aug 18, 2017)

Architecture is quite the complicated topic, and there are actual solutions to basically everything you've said, although they might interfere with the Gothic look you want. However, since you brought up it being a magical place, why not just take that and run with it? Don't bother making it plausible. Make it *magical*.


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## DragonOfTheAerie (Aug 18, 2017)

TheKillerBs said:


> Architecture is quite the complicated topic,



Noticed.  



> and there are actual solutions to basically everything you've said, although they might interfere with the Gothic look you want.



It's a combination of styles, but most heavily influenced by Gothic. Anything helps. I can't find the mentioned solutions, that's why I made the post. 



> However, since you brought up it being a magical place, why not just take that and run with it? Don't bother making it plausible. Make it *magical*.



This particular setting doesn't have much explicit/obvious magic. Basically, magic is largely extinct, and lingers only in the remnants of what was built by the magic users, like this monastery. I mean, I guess I could have something be obviously magical, but i'd like to keep it all shrouded in mystery. And magic is supposed to have diminished/faded somewhat. 

Anyway, I'm not quite sure what you're thinking of when you say magic. Something obvious like portal doors or rooms being 'bigger on the inside, or...?' That would wreck my aesthetic for the most part. If youre talking about stretching structural integrity,I don't mind a little of that. I'd just like to stay away from really obvious examples of magic.


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## DragonOfTheAerie (Aug 18, 2017)

pmmg said:


> Whose to say yours does not?
> 
> I think if you are asking about the spires on a cathedral, I do think they tend to be empty, contain a stairs, or are a bell tower. I would suspect the Sistine Chapel has some secret rooms though. And a catacombs...



Yeah, watched a tour of one f the towers of Salisbury Cathedral on youtube. Just internal support beams, walkways and stairs, and bells at the top. 

And I don't know, I just need to describe this particular area of my setting in great detail, for plot reasons, so there's not a lot of room to be vague or handwavey.


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## TheKillerBs (Aug 19, 2017)

I was actually saying go full Hogwarts, but if it would ruin the setting of the story... Anyway, if you want to have a really tall stone building, you do it with very thick walls that taper near the top. The bigger it is, the more pronounced the difference in thickness will have to be. If it's _really_ tall, it will be more like a ziggurat rather than an actual cathedral.

If you want to have towers that aren't in the footprint of the building, you give the room below a vaulted ceiling (as a rule, any stone ceiling needs to be vaulted). If it's a hollow tower, all the better.

Secret rooms on a big sprawling stone building would be really easy to hide. Also, since this is some monastery thing, I'm guessing it's got religious significance, so you could simply hide rooms behind sacred or otherwise forbidden places.

Regarding the dimensions, how big is huge and sprawling? The size of a football field? The size of the stadium around the football field?


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## skip.knox (Aug 19, 2017)

Much depends on the purpose of the tower. The simplest is a keep, which is basically a square with the interior on each level being mostly open. A keep was intended as a retreat of last resort, not living quarters. These are indeed only three or four stories tall. For a really fancy one, look at the White Tower (Tower of London).
White Tower | Tower of London | Historic Royal Palaces 

A different sort of tower are the family towers one finds in north Italian cities. These were residences, with various rooms on each floor. These could be quite grand. The one in Lucca even has oak trees growing on the top!
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AQ_FWytX9...Torre+Guinigi+Tower+Lucca+Tuscany+Italy+1.jpg
Italian towns used to bristle with these.

Then there are bell towers, which exist mainly to elevate the bell high enough that it could be heard throughout the town. (fantasy stories should make more use of bells, imo)

Cathedral towers likewise tended to be mostly empty, as they were decorative. Incredibly wasteful, though one German town on the Baltic coast (Rostock? Wismar? one of those) built their church tower very high with the specific purpose of being easily seen by ships. Very important for a port town.

Then there are the towers on city walls, whose main purpose is to elevate archers and others so they can defend gates. Interiors were again mostly empty. All towers--even church ones--did tend to become convenient storage places. 

Does any of that help? If we knew what kind of scenes were supposed to take place in said tower, we might be able to add more. (who is "we" here? the voices in my head are silent)


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## DragonOfTheAerie (Aug 19, 2017)

TheKillerBs said:


> I was actually saying go full Hogwarts, but if it would ruin the setting of the story... Anyway, if you want to have a really tall stone building, you do it with very thick walls that taper near the top. The bigger it is, the more pronounced the difference in thickness will have to be. If it's _really_ tall, it will be more like a ziggurat rather than an actual cathedral.
> 
> If you want to have towers that aren't in the footprint of the building, you give the room below a vaulted ceiling (as a rule, any stone ceiling needs to be vaulted). If it's a hollow tower, all the better.
> 
> ...



It's funny that you mention Hogwarts because that's probably one of the main inspirations for this place, subconsciously. It's basically Murder Hogwarts. 

And I really have no idea how big it is...


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## DragonOfTheAerie (Aug 19, 2017)

skip.knox said:


> Much depends on the purpose of the tower. The simplest is a keep, which is basically a square with the interior on each level being mostly open. A keep was intended as a retreat of last resort, not living quarters. These are indeed only three or four stories tall. For a really fancy one, look at the White Tower (Tower of London).
> White Tower | Tower of London | Historic Royal Palaces
> 
> A different sort of tower are the family towers one finds in north Italian cities. These were residences, with various rooms on each floor. These could be quite grand. The one in Lucca even has oak trees growing on the top!
> ...



Thanks for the help. And basically, the tower is where the Headmistress of Murder Hogwarts has her office+living quarters+secret room where she hides her illegitimate son. A tower just seemed better than a closet somewhere, and harder to access. And I have to describe it so well because MC is going to break in.

That's a really cool pic, too (the one with trees on top)


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## pmmg (Aug 19, 2017)

Sorry but is this hogwarts from harry potter?  If so would there just be a lot of magic to all of it. Towers in cathedrals tend to be vacant but towers in other structures may have different purposes.  Spme might even have rooms and secrets.


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## TheKillerBs (Aug 19, 2017)

DragonOfTheAerie said:


> It's funny that you mention Hogwarts because that's probably one of the main inspirations for this place, subconsciously. It's basically Murder Hogwarts.
> 
> And I really have no idea how big it is...



If you're going to make a complete floor plan, the dimensions is one of the first things you need to define. Kinda important, that.


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