Many of the great city monasteries of the medieval age are now lost to us. But, each transformation in the urban fabric leaves a trace: fragments of physical material; the persistence of property boundaries; observations in letters and drawings. Working back from the present, these traces can help us reconstruct a site towards its earliest origins. Only fragments remain of the St. Katharinen monastery in Bremen (Germany). Cowering beneath a brutalist multistory car park, it’s hardly discernable to the casual observer. How has St Katharinen changed over time?
The fragmentary survival of the St Katharinen monastery is coupled with a near-absent archaeological record and little scholarly research to date. Since 2010, I have been assembling the most extensive body of construction, land registry, visual, textual, 3D scanning and Lidar data yet assembled for the site. Whilst a project of this kind is grounded in the traditional approaches of historical architectural research, it is the capacity to assemble and analyze these diverse data sources within digital environments that makes conjectural digital reconstruction work possible. New insights are now emerging, from a large-grain diachronic reconstruction of the site from the present day back to the fifteenth century, through to the placement of known, but now lost and un-sited, architectural features such as window and door openings. An ongoing challenge in the reconstruction process concerns the shape and orientation of the church’s west front: current data suggest a particularly unusual “kinked” frontage bounded by a narrow and curving street – a unique example that can inform our understanding Dominican building practices in the medieval period.
Publications and Conferences
Senior, T. J. (2018). Reconstructing St. Katharinen: Archival Archaeology in Action. Studies in Digital Heritage, 2(2), 166-176. https://doi.org/10.14434/sdh.v2i2.24442
Senior, T.J. (2014). Der Dominikanerorden in Bremen: Die Formung einer religiösen, kulturellen und städtischen Struktur. Schriftenreihe des Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Bremen, 11:97-109
Senior T. J., Wiencek F., Szabo V. (2013). A Collaborative Engagement With Urban Heritage. IEEE Xplore Digital Library, Digital Heritage International Congress, 2013(2):349 – 352
Teaching
Senior T. J., Wiencek F., Szabo V. (2013). Digital Cities. Undergraduate course at Jacobs University and Duke University (Spring semester: USC 020079; ISIS 380S; VMS 380S)
Senior T. J. (2011). The place of Memory. Undergraduate course at Duke University (Spring semester: ISIS 120.01; VISUALST 190.02; GERMAN 198.02)
