Faculty 6: Award for the best bachelor thesis 2021

The outwardly inconspicuous chapel of St. Peter on the cathedral island marks the location of the oldest church building in the city of Brandenburg an der Havel and at the same time a historically significant place in the history of the development of today's Mark Brandenburg. The original construction of its predecessor building was initiated by the last Slav prince Pribislav, presumably around the year 1130. The present building substance of the chapel is probably based on the remains of two predecessor buildings and bears witness to nine centuries of Brandenburg's urban and architectural history. On the basis of several theories, the present work attempts to present the controversial history of the origin and use of the church building.

In addition to its historical value, the special feature of St. Peter's Chapel is its late Gothic cellular vaulting, which is almost unique for the Brandenburg region and has probably spanned the church interior since 1520. This special form of vaulting spread from 1470, starting from Meissen, in wide areas of Central Europe and is characterized by its high-bosomed, pyramid-shaped vault caps made of bricks and the mostly rib-less sharp-edged ridges and valleys. The building survey methods of tacheometry and photogrammetry were used to establish the planning basis of the chapel vault, according to the principle of reverse engineering. While the latter did not lead to representative results due to difficult conditions in the interior of the chapel, a set of plans was created from the measured values of the tacheometry, which revealed previously unexplored dimensions of the vault.

The measured values obtained allowed conclusions to be drawn about some of the construction principles and special features of the Brandenburg cellular vault and a comparison of the present construction with general rules of late medieval vault construction. In addition, a rough mathematical estimation of the vault thrust from the individual load-bearing groined arches as well as the load transfer across the chapel walls was possible. The knowledge gained can form the basis for more detailed research steps on the vault of the Brandenburg St. Petri Chapel and contribute to the study of late Gothic cellular vaults.