I HAVE SPENT THE BETTER PART OF THE LAST DECADE at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. For most of that time, my office was in the church itself, high up at the Triforium level. Few people in this age have the chance to walk up and down a stone spiral staircase going to and from work. And few have had to gauge the weather outside by looking at the brightness of St. Paul’s face in an immense stained glass window.
I love to wander high up along the parapets and beneath the roof on the convex side of the vaults. But more impressive to me than these is the Cathedral’s foundation and its well.
Architects love to pore over the plans and elevations of cathedrals. I imagine that if every page ever devoted to arch, vault, and buttress were assembled in one place, you could construct a life-sized model of Chartres out of the paper alone. Yet the number of pages devoted to the foundations of these greatest and heaviest of all Western stone structures would not even fill a briefcase.
This knowledge imbalance has had some comical, and costly, results at my church. When the Episcopalians of New York City decided in 1892 to begin the construction of a massive cathedral for their diocese, they looked at drawings of Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals before settling on a magnificent Byzantine-Romanesque design by the firm of Heins & LaFarge. Of course, the drawings, like those of most books of church architecture, made no reference to the foundations. These were assumed.
The builders began to chip and blast away at the outcrop of Manhattan schist selected for the church’s site. It looked like a simple matter, since the outcrop had a very shallow overburden of loose soil. Beneath, it ought to have been solid metamorphic stone. But as Eugene Viollet-le-Duc might have warned them, stone can be more treacherous than clay. Every foot of excavation revealed another web of cracked and twisted rock.
Across the street, a separate team of builders had begun on St. Luke’s Hospital. The two teams began as rivals, racing informally to get their holes dug first. Pretty soon, however, the terms of the rivalry changed. Would the cathedral builders hit bedrock by the time the St. Luke’s foundation was done? Or would they ever strike bedrock at all?
Angry Episcopal missives flew back and forth; there was talk of abandoning the hole. Then, the industrialist J. P. Morgan wrote a blank check, saying “Dig it and be done.” One half million dollars (twenty million dollars in today’s currency) went into that hole, and St. Luke’s Hospital was wholly built and dedicated, before the church’s foundation was done.
Forty million years previously, the diggers would have found no difficulty, since at that time the schist had not yet been twisted and fractured into the jigsaw puzzle of fragments that it is today. On the other hand, the Hudson River had not yet appeared, either, so Manhattan real estate would not have been so valuable.
It is a good thing, however, that they did find bedrock. Though Heins & LaFarge were fired and the church continued as a massive Gothic cathedral under the direction of Ralph Adams Cram, it was the weightiest Gothic undertaking ever. With its towers still incomplete, the cathedral weighs about 253,000 tons.
Bedrock, as solid as it sounds, is an abstraction that refers to stone that has not yet been deformed. True bedrock can carry about a thousand tons to the square yard in load, but finding it can be difficult. Regardless, it is perilous to forget that buildings don’t simply sit on the ground with the weightlessness of pen lines on paper; they rest on the surface of the Earth.
The great foundations of history have all been for ceremonial buildings, and the early Mediterranean experience with them would have made very vivid the parable in the Bible of the well-built house:
Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand; And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell; and great was the fall of it. (Matthew 7:24—27)
In fact, even the solidest foundations in practice might not hold, since in addition to salting fields, a conqueror who wished utterly to destroy a city would rip out its foundations. “I have destroyed the city right down to its foundations,” said King Sennacherib of Nineveh, referring to his conquest of Babylon. “I have followed this with a flood, and I have ordered the materials extracted from the lower foundations to be thrown into the Euphrates that they may be carried to the sea.”
In the ancient Near East, furthermore, many foundations sank of their own accord. The cities of the Mesopotamian plain were founded on spongy alluvial soils, and the first great ziggurats demonstrated the principle of isostatic adjustment admirably: every few years, the priests would have them built a few steps higher to compensate for the sinking of the bottom story into the soil.
It is a strange fact, but what builders began to learn at the beginning of the Monumental Era—perhaps a good name for the Western world— was that the surface of the Earth was itself a kind of sea, requiring piers and rafts to support the brick and stone towers raised upon it. The first thing the ziggurat builders learned, indeed, was to plait layers of woven reed mats between the courses of bricks, which made a simple, slender raft to spread and equalize the downward force of the temple and the spreading splash-response of the soil. This is the same principle used by the Greeks when they joined stone slabs with iron pegs to found their temples and when the Romans and we moderns followed with concrete rafts on which to found our structures.
But perhaps the greatest foundations of all are those of a few of the Gothic cathedrals, particularly Amiens. A dozen courses of stone and mortared rubble beneath ground level formed a raft for the entire structure, so that where the piers of the nave and choir descend into the earth, a closely integrated pyramid of underground stones spreads into the ground until it rests on the virgin clay more than twenty feet beneath. To see the full drawing of this structure from the top of the flying buttresses down to the foundation is to comprehend the true structure of the Gothic cathedral. Each pier has the form of an arrow, with the foundation stones playing the part of the feathers that keep the point on target. The drawings look like a quiver of arrows, poised for a shot at the divine.
Few structures of any sort have ever had such an honest relation to the ground they stand in. But the cathedrals needed to be honest buildings, because by their very weight they intruded into the earth, insisting on bringing it into relation with the heavens.
Often, cathedrals were built with an underground crypt, a damp place where relics were stored, and where a spring might rise. Even at Saint John the Divine, the weight of the building and the need for a deep foundation caused a living spring to rise in the crypt. The base of the Cathedral is now beneath the water table. But in at least two cases, cathedrals were intentionally built to incorporate the forces of the Earth, in the form of a venerated water source.
Legend has long had it that the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres was built on the site of a druid’s cave, where pagans had worshiped a dark-skinned virgin mother goddess beside a hidden well. It was said to have been an important place of pilgrimage long before the birth of Christ.
In the mid-seventeenth century the pious Vincent Sablon spoke of the well and its dark-skinned Madonna in great detail, recounting at least the well as a present fact. Known as the Well of the Strong Saints (Saints Forts), it was said to have taken its name from a persecution of the first century, when the Roman emperor had had numberless Christians killed and stuffed into the well. Far from stopping the cult of the Virgin, however, the emperor’s action simply provided the nascent church with more martyrs to venerate.
According to Sablon, the generations of early Christian pilgrims who flocked here worshiped their black Madonna as Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre, or Our Lady Under Ground. At the well, they took water both for baptisms and for cures. Even after Bishop Fulbert had built his cathedral here in the ninth century, the faithful still descended into its dark crypt to visit this most sacred place.
But by the end of the nineteenth century, the whole story smacked of legend. Where was this famous well, anyway? There was no sign of it in the musty crypt of the twelfth-century cathedral, and indeed there stood a wall where it was supposed to have been. In any case, it held no place of honor, even were it really there. It was too messy and too wet an idea for the rational religion of the turn of the century.
Then, in 1901, the archaeologist Merlet found it. The wall that covered it was, in fact, a late seventeenth-century addition to the church. Prior to that time, a gap had been left in the foundation courses, specifically to leave the well revealed.
Merlet found it to be a rough tank about nine feet square, carved in the limestone of the hill. When he scooped out the clay with which it had been filled, he found that the well was a hundred feet deep. The well had been partly filled with earth as long ago as the twelfth century, when its great depth might have endangered the deep foundation stones of two pillars of the Gothic choir.
The high-rising spires of Chartres rest on this foundation of dark water. Though all the legends of druidical rites may be fallacious—they do not seem to predate the fourteenth century—the point of the legends is a good one. It is unmistakably true that Chartres was intentionally built over an ancient well, not so important that it could change the orientation or placement of the Gothic cathedral, but important enough that the church would preserve a place for it, even when logically it should have been covered with a wall.