In the Saxon villages of Transylvania one building does three jobs. It is the church, it is the fortress the village retreats into, and it is the store where the grain and the bacon hang. Ring walls carry chemins de ronde, battlements and loopholes; the steep red tile roof outweighs the facade it sits on.

The design language follows the plan, not the piety. Limewash over field stone as the ground, burnt clay tile as the one loud colour, and a strict grid of small numbered cells — one per family — as the structural motif. Blackletter appears where it appeared on the gravestones: large, and rarely.