Salisbury Cathedral (1:1 scale)
Minecraft Cathedral by THSchutt (2023)
To draw juxtaposition with French Gothic, I chose for my next build one of the quintessential examples of English Gothic: Salisbury Cathedral. While the mastery of vertical space is a pillar of French Gothic, English Gothic emphasizes horizontal space with long naves and sometimes multiple transepts. And while a monumental western facade with twin towers is a customary feature of French cathedrals, English cathedrals tend to prioritize their impressive central towers, often leaving the scale of their frontispiece more reserved.
True to my style, this model is intended to be a reasonably close 1-to-1 scale replica of the real cathedral with modest deviations in scale to harmonize with its aesthetics. The overall build is a bit larger than 1-to-1 scale, maybe being about 10–15% larger overall than the real cathedral, but much like Notre-Dame and Amiens I view this to be within acceptable tolerance of categorizing this build as a 1-to-1 model. The greatest advantage of respecting the general scale of a 1-1 building is that it can nestle nicely within a standard Minecraft World, rather than sticking out like a sore thumb like some of the oversized x2, x3, or even greater scaled cathedral builds out there. The Central Spire is *slightly* taller than the real one but only to match with the shapely proportions of the real one.
DIMENSIONS: MODEL (blocks) vs. REAL (m)
Nave Height: 27 vs. 26
Total Length: 158 vs. 135
Rooftop Height: 39 vs. 35
Facade Width: 43 vs. 34.5
Tower Height: 74 vs. 69
East Transept Width: 61 vs. 49.5
Spire Height: 144 vs. 123
West Transept Width: 75 vs. 66
Cloister Square Length: 53 vs. 58
While French Cathedrals are typically crowned with a semi-circular chevet with an ambulatory and radiating chapels, English cathedrals are usually squared off at both ends without such fancy curves. But what they may lack in annular detail, they make up for with sprawling transepts, wings, and cloisters. Salisbury Cathedral has the largest arcaded cloister in England with two mighty cedars in the center, planted to commemorate Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne.
Up until now, my builds have largely all been within the grey stone palette, and it was my desire to practice using a new palette for my next build. Since mud bricks had just arrived in patch 1.19, I chose to build Salisbury Cathedral in this brown scheme. Salisbury truly falls more in the beige-ish/yellow-ish color scheme, depending on how you look at it in the sunlight, but it is generally darker and dirty than some of the more recently cleaned cathedrals like Notre-Dame and St. Paul’s, so using the brown mud-brick palette felt appropriate enough, and I am quite happy with the results.
I decided to double down on my use of trapdoors for this build. While not ideal, the subtle shifts in depth they provide with varying textures of stone enable many new design possibilities. The columns of the nave are slightly wider than one block when surrounded by trap doors, as are the bases of the buttresses along the exterior of the aisles. And this was the first build where I decided to use a command block to place armor stands, posing as statues, positioned partway between blocks to squeeze them into the various niches of the western frontispiece. These new tricks with trapdoors and armor stands will be invaluable to some of my upcoming projects. While Salisbury Cathedral has been one of my easier builds so far, despite my preference for French Gothic, I have a special love for English cathedrals like this one, and I am happy to share it with you all.
