Saint Pierre Cathedral – Virtual Reality Tour

Saint Pierre de Beauvais

An Introduction to the VR Tour

In 2017 Professor Dan Younger documented the grandiose interior of Saint Pierre de Beauvais, a 13th century cathedral in Beauvais, France. This website is home to the stunning imagery he captured and the 360 Degree Virtual Tour he created.

After receiving a grant from the University of Missouri St. Louis, Younger took what he calls “flat” photographs, made with his standard digital camera, as well as 360° “ball” images.

The 360° images on this site were done with a Panono camera that shoots 36 images at once, capturing an entire instantaneous 360° view from that camera. Both the flat pictures and the 360° VR (virtual reality) images are available through this site. Younger had been invited in 2015 to exhibit in a photo festival in Beauvais, and he toured the interior of Saint Pierre. He made pictures at that time. When he returned home, he realized those “flat images“ did not explain what it was like to be there and experience the volume and majesty of the space. The new Panono 360° camera had just been introduced, and he proposed to the university that he travel to Beauvais and photograph the interior of Saint Pierre with 360° images. He proposed a VR tour of the cathedral, attempting to create the same effect he experienced being there in person.

The standard flat images are available by clicking on the button below. These photographs are all vertical images, which do not display well on a horizontal computer monitor. When you click on the full image you can then get a much bigger image that you can scan up and down to see what it looks like close up. It is then possible to exit and go to the next image. Some of the “flat” Images that have people in them give you some sense of the scale of that building.

When you click on the 360° tour, you will be brought into the center of the choir area of Saint Pierre. Once inside the first image you can look straight up and around in every direction. Inside each image are “bull’s-eyes” that connect you to images further ahead or behind the one you are looking at. If you look at the very bottom of each image you will see a floor plan of the cathedral with a red dot indicating where you’re located inside that floor plan.

Opening the 360° web site, you’ll start in the middle of the choir. Look straight up. What you are looking at is a ceiling 13 floors above your head. When construction of Saint Pierre ended in the 17th century, it was the highest ceiling in any European medieval cathedral.

Saint Pierre was being constructed at the same time as the cathedral in Amiens (The Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Amiens), only 50 kilometers (31 miles) away. The builders in Amiens intended the interior of that cathedral to be impressive encompassing more cubic feet than Saint Pierre just down the road. It was also completed sooner than Saint Pierre.

Since the builders in Beauvais considered themselves in competition with the Amiens cathedral, they revised the original plans during the construction of Saint Pierre and constructed the ceiling 16 feet higher from its original design, which made it the highest ceiling in the medieval world.

That height caused problems. Since the cathedral was already in construction, the extra 16-foot revision dictated that each buttress and associated flying buttresses had to be extended upwards and made thinner to compensate for the new height. The first part of the cathedral was the choir and it was finished in 1272. (This is where your tour starts.)

Services in that part of Saint Pierre started right away. However, it was only 12 years later when part of the interior of the cathedral collapsed. Builders added extra columns to support the interior walls of the choir and eventually added iron rods as bracing for the interior and the exterior of the Cathedral. The choir and the associated ambulatory area remained as the extent of the Cathedral of Saint Pierre for 150 years. In 1500, work was begun on a transept. It was finished in 1548. (You can tour the transept by clicking on any of the dots east of the choir.)

Instead of building the nave and completing the ground floor of the cathedral, authorities decided to put up a 500-foot spire on top of the already high 13-foot roof of the transept.

East wall, the arch of the only part of the nave built now housing the pipe organ

Built of both stone and wood, it was the tallest structure in all of Europe when completed in 1569. However the spire collapsed four years later taking a part of the transept with it. Eventually the transept was repaired but without the spire. Only one vault of the projected nave was ever completed. (You can see that one vault if you are on any viewing point in the transept. You need to just look east and the large pipe organ is built on the wall of that first nave.) By 1600 no more work was done on the cathedral.

The wood bracing you see (look south and up while in the transept) was done in the 1960s. Iron rods braced the flying buttresses on the exterior of the building. It was decided that they were ugly, and would not endanger the church if removed. However the high and thin buttresses of the choir were affected by strong winds, especially from storms moving in from the English Channel. Eventually oscillations of the buttresses from the wind caused the south wall of the choir to move east into the transept. The exterior metal bracing was reinstalled on the exterior of the choir to re-stabilize the church. Both the interior wood bracing you see (look south and up when in the transept) and the cracks in the south choir wall (look south and up from your view in the center choir) are a result of that decision to remove the exterior bracing.

We hope you get the impression from this website of what it’s like to tour a medieval cathedral. Of course, nothing will supplant the experience of being there personally. Plan a tour of one of the beautiful medieval cathedrals yourself.