Why Build a Square Walkway Around a Lawn? The Corridor Is the Building

The arrangement is a square or rectangular open space surrounded on all four sides by a covered walk, with the buildings of the community opening off that walk. It serves as circulation, since every room is reached from it without going outside. It supplies light and air to the surrounding buildings, since each range has windows onto the open space. It provides shelter for walking and working in any weather. It encloses the community physically, since the outer walls of the surrounding ranges form a boundary with only controlled openings. And the open centre supplies a garden, a well or a burial ground. Those functions together explain why the form was adopted almost universally.

The arrangement of rooms around it is remarkably consistent:

• •The church along one side, usually the north to shelter the space from wind
• •The chapter house, where the community met daily to conduct business
• •The dormitory above, reached by stairs from the walk and from the church
• •The refectory, with a pulpit for reading aloud during meals
• •The warming house, frequently the only heated room
• •Storage, the kitchen and the route to the infirmary and the guest accommodation

The walk was a workplace rather than merely a passage, which explains features that otherwise look odd. Writing and copying were done there in many houses, using the north walk where light was steadiest, and stone benches and recesses for book cupboards survive in a number of examples. Washing before meals happened at a trough or fountain positioned near the refectory entrance, and elaborate structures survive at several sites. Reading and study occupied the individual bays. Processions moved around the walk on Sundays and feast days along prescribed routes. Teaching of novices took place in a designated part. Silence was generally required, which is why business was conducted in the chapter house rather than on the walk.

The open space was planted rather than left bare in most houses, and what grew there carried meaning as well as use. A well or a fountain at the centre supplied water and was read as a symbol of life. Herbs for the infirmary were grown within reach of it. Fruit trees appear in surviving plans. Grass was cut for hay in some houses. Burials took place beneath it, which is why excavation frequently finds graves. Written descriptions and a small number of surviving medieval plans, most famously an idealised ninth century drawing from Saint Gall showing an entire planned monastery, record the intended arrangement in detail even where nothing survives on the ground.

The arrangement appears across an enormous range of buildings that have nothing to do with monastic life, which indicates that it solves a general problem well. Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge adopted it directly, since a community living, eating and worshipping together needs the same things, and the quadrangle is the same form. Hospitals and almshouses used it. Roman houses had used a comparable arrangement centuries earlier around a central court, and Islamic architecture uses the same enclosed courtyard with an arcade extensively. The form recurs because an enclosed courtyard surrounded by an arcade supplies light, shelter, circulation, privacy and a defensible boundary at once, in any climate where an open centre is usable.

A covered walk around an open square supplies circulation, light, air, shelter, enclosure and a garden at once, with the church, chapter house, dormitory and refectory opening off it in a consistent arrangement. The walk was a workplace where copying, washing, teaching and processions happened, under a general requirement of silence. The same form appears in colleges, hospitals and courtyard houses because it solves a general problem.