Cathedral Workshop at St. Stephen - Vienna

The facilities of the cathedral church masons' guilds look back to a long tradition. The first masons' guilds were formed in the Middle Ages, consisting of stonemasons, sculptors and architects, working under the management of a "cathedral master builder" and transmitting traditional workmanship from one generation to the next. Today, the Viennese "Dombauhütte" at St.Stephen's Cathedral still follows similar principles: It is a non-profit-organisation, only serving the preservation of the cathedral. Today, 20 stonemasons are working under the guide of Dombaumeister Zehetner, there is also an office for the planning and organisation of works, as well as the archive, where plans, documentations and photos are stored.
Modern methods of preservation and maintenance of the historical structural fabric demand for precise documentation of the condition of the structure as well as the measures. Due to the permanently increasing amount of data, the increasing scientific demands on documentation and the increasing number of possible measures requiring specific skills, it was highly necessary to find ways to use IT-support for managing these activities. This led to a EU co-financed project "Cathedral.IT" which was performed in 2000/01. "Cathedral.-IT" helps the stonemason's lodge to improve their permanent care for their building, to do the monitoring and the preservation more systematic and more concentrated on the points needing it.
One of the main parts in this project was the setup of a sophisticated database-system for the archive, which is beeing filled with data in the current DECA-project.

Dombausekretariat St. Stephan,
Stephansplatz 3, A-1010 Wien tel +43 (0)1 51552 3714,
office@dombauwien.at web: www.dombauwien.at