This church, whose design would be given to Heinrich Parler, the architect of Holy Cross Minster in Schwäbisch Gmünd. The first plan was to build a stepped hall church with aisles as wide and almost as high as the central nave, with a main spire on the west and two steeples above the choir ( long, wide). The women of the Ulmer Assemblage would also make their contributions to the foundation works, something memorialized by 17th and 18th century composer Barbara Kluntz. Michael Parler, who had experience from working at the Dombauhütte in Prague, assumed construction of the church in 1381 and continued work on the nave, which had originally been conceived as a triple-aisled hall church with approximately equal height and width. From 1387 to 1391, Heinrich III Parler managed construction as head of the Bauhütte. Then in 1392 Ulrich Ensingen, associated with Strasbourg Cathedral, was appointed master builder. It was Parler's plan to construct the Ulm Minster's spire, the highest of any church. In order to balance its proportions, the nave was now to be much taller than the Parlers had intended, making a noticeable difference in height between the chancel and nave. The church was consecrated on 25 July 1405. In 1446, Ulrich's son Matthäus took over construction and finished the choir vault in 1449 and the vault over the northern nave in 1452. When he died in 1463, his own son, Mortiz, took over construction. Himself dying in 1471, he completed the vaulting over the nave and constructed the sacrament house, finally making the church a basilica according to Ulrich's plan. In 1477, Matthäus Böblinger took over and made changes to the plans of the church but especially to the main tower and in doing so caused the church's first major structural threat: the heavy vaults of the wide aisles and high nave burdened the columns with too much lateral force at different heights. A new master builder, Burkhart Engelberg of Augsburg, tackled the structural damage by reinforcing the foundation of the west tower and demolishing the heavy aisle vaults and replacing them with vaults of half widths, which afforded rows of additional columns dividing each of the aisles in two. Although catastrophe had been avoided, the walls were left without their buttresses for 350 years and the northern wall of the nave bulges outward by even today. In a referendum in 1530/31, the citizens of