Ruffenhofen is one of those places that, after 1400 years of settlement and development, remains a handful of houses and fields.

Ruffenhofen lies in southern Germany astride the Limes, a line of forts and walls the Romans built at the height of their empire between 83 and 260 AD. This mixed construction of stone and timber ran between the conquered lands of the empire and the free space of the barbarians, as Roman historian Tacitus referred to the Germanic tribes. The wall protected the highly developed economic infrastructures of classical antiquity from the advancing tribes of the north. It provided a stable physical blockade for a professional, monolithic army to hold at bay asymmetrical, cellular attacks. The defensive line sheltered a network of roads that connected city structures and building forms exported from the capitol, Rome. It was eventually breached and the capitol far to the south was sacked multiple times after 410 AD.

The empire fell into chaos, and new peoples developed the areas that had been behind the wall. The early middle ages, the dark ages, produced the beginnings of central European society, building its foundations on the physical ruins of the defeated imperial presence. These new villages and towns often developed at places along rivers, where horses could easily ford without the need of bridges. At many of theses points, monks established monasteries around which communities developed; some into major commercial centers, while others remained a handful of houses with a church and perhaps an inn at its center. These houses and barns huddled on their church provided shelter for people and animal, and the farmers’ patchwork of fields ringed the village.

Ruffenhofen is one of those places that, after 800 years of settlement and development, remains a handful of houses and fields. From a distance today it looks as if it came out of an Albrecht Dürer watercolor. Nuremberg, the main city of Franconia, was a bustling governmental and commercial center at the time lies fifty miles to the north of here. Here, at the birth of the modern age of western history, the seeing and the representation of what one saw jumped from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional world. Space replaced surface. At the same time, the superficial, autocratic administration of biblical teachings was being questioned by Martin Luther. The Catholic Church was of course the central institution, which provided for a pyramidal, hierarchical, and international model on which to base medieval social structure. All were there to serve, God but only from the bottom up, through the clergy.

The St. Nikolaus Church, at the center of Ruffenhofen, was for the most part constructed in the second half of the 14th century. It is a very simple collection of rectangles and triangles in plan and section. Its solid proportions and paucity of windows speak to its worldly use as a place of refuge. Not only was a village church a place of shelter from the devil; it was a place of shelter from marauding bands and advancing armies as well. Its small windows are less for admitting light than for providing for protected defensive weapons.

As with all buildings of its time, there were no architects involved. Buildings were designed and built by master craftsmen who received their knowledge through practice on the job from the generation before them, knowledge that they in turn passed to the following generation. The materials are from the area: rubble and dressed stone, perhaps in part from the Limes. The hand hewn roof constructions are of the 17th or 18th century, with fitted, interpenetrating, and interweaving wood-on-wood connections made by timber wrights, i.e. carpenters who traveled the countryside, bringing their knowledge from site to site. Even today, there is no electricity, and light is cast through the squinting windows and from a large, simple, candle chandelier. It illuminates a few rows of timber pews which, along with an equally austere wooden balcony, help to frame a fresco from the end of the 15th century.

This Late Gothic, Catholic church would become Protestant. It would have been a place of refuge for the farmers during the Peasant War of 1525, an event of insight in which the peasants challenged the landowners. Luther had questioned the basics of the established belief system by translating the Bible from Latin, the language of the rulers, into German, the language of the believers. He was abetted by technology. Gutenberg’s press made the translation widely available: mass scale distribution, pop text on the streets for the first time. The peasants thought he was questioning the hierarchical structure of society. They were wrong. His argument was theoretical, not practical. When they rose up and questioned their lives of servitude to barons and dukes, Gutenberg hung them out to dry, and their rebellion was quashed. The hierarchical structures were left in place with different names. A Protestant power hierarchy replaced the Catholic.  Paraphrasing historian Harvey Goldberg: “We do not study history to memorize dates, to recite which king or queen followed whom. We study history to glean kernels of knowledge we can apply to today.” Can we learn from a small church, a romantic remnant?  Today, we are at a place in the march of history that strangely parallels 1525 or, for that matter, the building of arrogant walls of empire from a millennium before. The Internet has made the monopoly of knowledge and its distribution obsolete. Physical walls of division, censorship, and propaganda may hold back challenges to the established order for a time. The real question is: can the ready access of information make the building of walls obsolete? As we jump from a four-dimensional world into and endless-dimensional world, will the idea of physical architecture become obsolete? Or will our ever-increasing shrinking of the physical world, paradoxically through the continuously expanding cyber world, bring us to a physical florid regionalism? Is a complex regional world, a heterogeneous world of respected difference, possible?

by Randall Kober