Amiens Cathedral (1:1 scale)
Minecraft Cathedral by THSchutt (2022)
While most of my recently published builds are projects that have developed over many years, I started this latest build of Amiens Cathedral in France only this year in January 2022. After all, the Cathedral Talk channel needs more cathedrals, and what better build to include this year than what many consider to be the apex of French Gothic.
As with many of my builds, this model is intended to be as close as possible to a 1-to-1 scale replica of the real cathedral while making only slight deviations where appropriate to facilitate good detailing in Minecraft. Overall the build is *slightly* larger than 1-to-1 scale, being perhaps about 10% larger overall than the real cathedral, but I view this to be within acceptable tolerance of categorizing this build as a 1-to-1 model. Amiens Cathedral is most famous for its nave height, and I worked particularly hard to build a model close to the 42.3 m nave height that the cathedral is said to have so the model will be to scale with my other builds like Notre-Dame de Paris, the Colosseum, and more.
DIMENSIONS: MODEL (blocks) vs. REAL (m)
Nave Height: 44 vs. 42.3
Total Length: 165 vs. 148
Rooftop Height: 59 vs. 56
Facade Width: 39 vs. 36
North Tower Height: 64.5 vs. 61
Tower Widths (ground): 13 vs. 12
South Tower Height: 59.5 vs. 55
Transept Width: 81 vs. 71
Spire Height: 121 vs. 112.7
As with all my replica builds, my Amiens interior is fully complete. Since cathedrals are such a sprawling complex of passages, I was forced to make a few guesses on the locations of a couple passageways due to limited source-data, particularly in the western facade which has aisles upon aisles stacked as you ascend the many tiers of the elevation. However I am reasonably confident that my interpretation is quite close to the original. One detail I want more evidence for is the locations of the different bells in the towers; Amiens Cathedral has at least six primary bells (maybe more)—two bourdons and four lighter bells. However I am uncertain which bells are hung in which towers, so that is a detail I will update sometime in the future.
Within the downloadable map, I have pasted my 1-to-1 scale model of Notre-Dame de Paris side-by-side with this new build of Amiens Cathedral so you can compare their relative sizes—both models should be very close in scale with each other. Clearly Amiens is the bigger cathedral, however Notre-Dame’s bell towers are much grander, and the relative proportions of Notre-Dame’s tiered levels feels more harmonious than at Amiens where the ground tier for the Main Arcade is so crazy tall that the triforium and to some extent even the clerestory feel dwarfed. Nevertheless, I have a new appreciation for the awesome behemoth that is Amiens Cathedral, and I am pleased to share it with you all.
