Before anyone complains that this removes the human aspect of art, it's worth stressing that sculptors have always looked for ways to automate work and save time (as the website itself points out).
As far back as ancient Egypt, grids and measuring tools were used to reproduce figures at different scales. Roman workshops churned out copies of Greek statues in marble and bronze, using casts and moulds. From the 18th century onwards, sculptors used outright pointing machines to transfer models into marble. James Watt, the steam engine guy, even built a mechanical sculpture-copying machine that could (somewhat) automatically reproduce reliefs and medallions.
Gothic architectural decoration wasn't about expressing the inner world of its makers in the way we think of art today. Much of it was produced by large masonry workshops using standardized geometry, wooden templates and repeated designs.
Understood and agreed, they need to construct or repair buildings efficiently...
However there is the concept of 'the resistance of the material' where the act of working with the material with bare hands and simple tools is a meditative process. Something I would have thought applicable to the contemplative and monastical life of a monk.
They still do, it's just that the first 95% of carving things out of rock is literally getting the rock into the shape needed to start doing actual scuplting.
I'm short, it's artistic boilerate with no meaningful value to either the artist or the viewer.
They address this in a roundabout way in the article:
> Ornate pieces that used to take months for a skilled carver, now can be accomplished in a matter of days. Instead of cutting out the beauty, using the excuse that it takes too long, thus doesn’t fit into the budget, modern technology can be used to make true Gothic in all its beauty a reality again today.
The options are either use the best tool for the job, or don't do the job at all because the budget (time or monetary I'm not sure) is not there.
Sure - but if you take especially late Gothic cathedrals like Milan's, there's 3400 Statues and 135 spires, decorated with almost 100.000 Crockets (the decorative elements on the steeple roofs). I feel these things are more mass production than meditative process...
I don't see any reason that someone couldn't still enjoy working with the material with bare hands and simple tools to meditate, even with the automated stone carving. People still play chess even though AI dominates.
I have a fascinating with hobos and freight train riders and watch a fair amount of videos on Youtube about it. One of hobo had a RAG he would query about train yards and catchout points. Wasn't a full timer, but built it last spring I gathered. Not art exactly, but a similar idea. Humans like shortcuts.
One small correction/addition! While the pointing machine is 18th century, the practice of pointing itself is quite a lot older. Its precursor was the three-compass method, which was known in antiquity and recovered in the 15th century. In fact, if you look closely at Michelangelo's David, you can see the little holes on the marble used for pointing.
That said, actual Gothic sculpture and decoration fell into that gap when pointing was lost. And the frankly lower quality of most medieval sculpture more or less reflects that. And anyway, nothing wrong with neo-Gothic.
Monumental Labs[0] takes a mixed approach to autonomy and human craftsmanship. For fine detail pieces like marble sculpture, the robot takes the project from stone block to a rough, 3D printed look. Then a human craftsman does fine work and polishing. For something like a plinth on a stone structure, the robot's output is good enough since the piece will only ever be viewed from afar (e.g. street level for a balcony).
Worth noting that the stonemasons of Sagrada Familia (the catholic basilica Barcelona) have been using CNC to carve it's stones since early 1990s. Most Barcelonians thought they would never see the temple finished in their lifetimes, myself included. Part of the progress that made its completion possible this year is thanks to this technology improving over time.
EDIT: Actually, it’s a mix of CNC roughing to shape the stone, followed by manual finishing. According to the Sagrada Família’s website, this allows each stone to remain a unique piece of craftsmanship while significantly speeding up the process.
What's kind of funny about CNC is there is a wood working tool that is the opposite of what you just mentioned. The Shaper Origin is a CNC router where the gross movements of the router are provided by the human operator's hands moving the thing, and the fine movements of the cutting head inside the router body are provided by XYZ positioning of the cutting head reacting to the machine's position over the workpiece using optical tracking. So you can get precision and an expansive work range, with a small footprint of the tool.
Didn't know that. This is what most excites me about the technology. Building beautiful and well crafted things historically has been extremely expensive. There is an Italian company I follow on X that specializes in CNC sculpting of Renaissance quality marble statues. Would love to see more bronze and marble statues around town celebrating society's heroes and heroines.
I love this story. They started roasting coffee and saving money for nearly a decade, until they could buy land in the mountains, and then set out to build a medieval monastery entirely in stone and developing the CNC machining. It's amazing what people can do when they have a goal.
I've always wondered why we haven't seen a broad architectural movement returning to highly ornate decorative facades now that technology has made this kind of thing (more) possible. We could be having so much more fun in architecture right now!
Perhaps this is because I've let Twitter radicalize me on this particular subject, but it seems like modern architecture is totally ideologically captured to be against this stuff.
There's this insistence that forms have to be "honest", so ornamental facades are out. Any attempt to revive a form is called "pastiche" (except modernist, which...uh, has been around for awhile now!). People always insist on "deconstruction" and "contrast" so they can never just build a rowhouse that looks like the other rowhouses. Etc.
There's study after study that shows that regular people are way more inclined to let things get built if it just looks good, and when people are presented with choices they'll basically always pick the classic-looking building. And yet we never seem to get them.
The more charitable read is that cost is part of the equation and people don't want to pay it, but that's 100% not the whole story. (Another part of the story is that people who buy the plans care the most about internal space with tons of light coming in, which probably drives a bunch of decisions on the outside.)
My cynical take is that architecture has been fully captured by the wealthy elite.
The elites like things the masses dislike as a way to signal their social distances from the masses. By designing a building that conforms to their elite taste at the expense of nearly everyone else who has to look at the thing, it reinforces their power and control over the space.
It's the moral equivalent of buying a beachfront property and blasting noise every morning from a giant PA system just so that everyone trying to just relax on the beach knows who is really in charge.
We can, but will you pay for it? The standard house building a house is cheap - some of those decorations would increase the costs by as much as double - but they won't increase the value of the house.
I have a rule of thumb that seems to hold: until you get to about 3500 sq feet in a house people will choose larger over decorations where possible. Larger than that and you don't want to clean the house yourself (that is unless your wealth supports regular professional cleaning you won't go much larger). Of course as a rule of thumb it isn't a hard rule, some people want more space, others can live with less. As houses get larger people are willing for more decoration cost.
For apartments it is worse - renters rarely will pay extra to live in a nice building.
This has been my hope for a while! I live in a 1911 house and the amount of small detail everywhere would be impossibly expensive by modern construction standards. I also like modern minimalism, but I know many of the drywall corners everywhere in modern homes aren't design decisions as much as cost savings measures.
If history has shown something is that minimalism always wins (don't confuse minimalism with the horrible/cheap building and design practices that are norm today)
you are right, i should have said simplicity and not minimalism (mostly in science and religion), oscillation/ movement and counter movement is always there in different formsthough
After seeing the real thing in a museum, I would love to have an Egyptian relief replica on the inside wall of my house. No sarcasm, I think it would be badass.
Up until the late 1800s, beauty was expensive. Therefore, it was a costly (i.e., believable) signal of wealth, status, and taste. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, modern manufacturing got going and made beauty cheap. The ornate wrought iron door that took some workman hundreds of hours to produce was a good signal. Now, a cast simulacrum can be made at scale and ordinary people can have beautiful doors.
This led the tastemaker art and architecture elite to start playing a kind of inside baseball where what's "beautiful" isn't beautiful in some objective sense, or to ordinary people, it's just what's trendy within their clique at a given time.
(and, to head you off at the pass: you may like brutalism or Obama's library, but the data clearly show that regular people do not)
We should really do something about this. Buildings affect everyone around them, and we should force people designing them to make buildings that regular people find beautiful.
I like this general hypothesis, but dislike this formulation:
> This led the tastemaker art and architecture elite to start playing a kind of inside baseball where what's "beautiful" isn't beautiful in some objective sense, or to ordinary people, it's just what's trendy within their clique at a given time.
I don't find "gothic" design beautiful though I can recognize the skill and devotion it represents; I do love shaker and bauhaus and scandi design. There is no "objective sense" when it comes to beauty.
I think you could rephrase this as "where what's beautiful is no longer determined by the amount of skill and effort to construct it", which I think is also true but also more meaningful and much more accomodating to the range of actual "ordinary people's" tastes ...
However, while you may be correct that the range of opinions among "regular people" encompasses people who like Bauhaus or brutalism, it is important to acknowledge that such people are the minority (and, fair to add "by far" in most settings).
Oooh this is cool. Create gothic-esque designs in stone construction using CNC. I like the apology right at the top: "medieval builders were always on the forefront of technology". Word.
I would to love to learn more about the metals used in their drill bits. I think about oil/gas drilling and tunnel boring machines. They are facing some of the harshest conditions possible. (Imagine a tunnel boring machine trying to carve through granite rock in Manhattan or Swiss Alps. It is tough!) These CNC machines are doing similar on a "micro-scale". How often do they need to sharpen or replace these drill bits? And what is the cost?
This is the same group of monks that run mystic monk coffee. I'm very fond of the Paradiso blend and am currently warming up to the thanksgiving blend though it wasn't my favorite at the start of the bag.
... and the audience is too mature to mention that the internet stole the acronym Computer Numerical Control, so its often shortened to Numerical Control to make it safe to search?
It may be worthwhile noting that the medieval Carmelites have pulled off some impressive civil engineering projects in their own right. St. John of the Cross himself is credited with the design and construction of an aqueduct for their monastery in Spain.
It may seem from our perspective that monasteries are full of prayer and spiritual endeavors, but they are also the site of a large amount of manual labor and highly-educated expertise that can be brought to bear on large projects like this.
Illustrated books often have a note about how the illustrations are made. One of my son's books had a joke note, saying that the illustrations were taken from a text of the monks of St. Parmesan (or something to that effect). Maybe the author was in on it, but it seems like a poorly thought out joke because so many cheeses were made by monks!
This is both incredible and I think… “misses the point” is the wrong phrase, but maybe omits something both subtle and crucial in the process.
A gothic cathedral is both an incredible work of art and also the work of hundreds or thousands of hands over decades and centuries - you are looking not just at the final product, but at the love and commitment it took to make that work of art, the long-term dedication and belief that it should exist even if we don’t live to see it exist. You’re looking at an expression of love not just for God and for art and beauty, but for future generations and people we’ll never know. The time and effort isn’t an unfortunate part of the process, it’s intrinsic to what we feel when we witness the cathedral - a connection to others, reaching both ways.
I understand why the monks have developed this technique, and I don’t disagree with them - the act of building a gothic cathedral is outside the capacity of modern society. I’ll never begrudge someone a hack to preserve some beauty in this machine we’ve created. But I can’t help but feel like they’ve created a facsimile of a cathedral - they’ve created the palace at Disneyland, not Notre Dame.
The proportions, materials, overall design is quite beautiful. How is that not an expression to God? Having a few hundred people die falling off of scaffolding and taking 50 years to build is not helping anyone today.
Perhaps a few dead bodies and a couple hundred years of recitations will do the trick?
Put another way, if monks in the year 1k had a CNC router like this, they wouldn’t have peasants take 50 years to arrive at their expression to God.
It’s the architecture and the design that reflects the Lord almighty. The peasants doing it are a means to an end: so the church stands tall, so they can massacre the non-believers, burn witches, infidels, and imprison astronomers. All in the comfort of a beautiful cathedral.
If the monks in the year 1k had CNC machines, they’d have built bigger and more elaborate cathedrals. The act was the message. The gothic cathedral was impossible by medieval standards, and that was part of the act of building it.
And, to your point, yes, if the monks followed the construction with a hundred years of prayer and sacrifice to consecrate the building, indeed the building would carry a more powerful emotional resonance than it does now. The sacrifice is the point, the effort is the point. It’s an act of devotion, not just one of construction.
Remember that this is a Catholic church, the church the monks worship in. Its primary role is to be a house for the Holy Eucharist and a place for the worship of God. The devotion in its creation is part of that; the beauty it embodies is in aid of that. For the monks, the emotional resonance stems from all of that, but is not in fact the point.
I realize most folks here have a different world view; but in the end, this building has no point whatsoever apart from how the monks see it.
For these monks and their church that may not be the point, for medieval churches it very much was. God was not something that a small group of people in the church believed in, God was a fact to those living in those places at those times. You’re right that folks here have a different world view, but you can’t understand the cathedral without understanding the world view of those who built it.
And - “this building has no point whatsoever apart from how the monks see it” is true for everything and every viewpoint.
Not every building with stone carvings will be gothic cathedrals with regular incomes- there will be thousands of small churches out there, which don't have the budget for expensive stonemasons to hand carve items for repairs.
If we want to protect historic buildings for generations to enjoy then we're going to need to be more pragmatic.
I think you're missing a subtlety of the situation. You're right that gothic cathedrals were enormous undertakings, and that the enormity was itself a worshipful and meditative act that drew in the entire community, current and future.
Even with the CNC machines, this is still a multi-decade endeavor that will span generations because the number of monks (and outside support) is small and not getting larger. They've scaled down the work required to match their capabilities, and still creating something that will last centuries. Relative to their community, it's still a cathedral effort.
The Sagrada Família is a "recently" built cathedral, and I'd say is on a similar level as a Gothic cathedral. So modern society is not necessarily incapable of similar feats.
Yes, I’d agree with this. I’d almost say it’s the exception that proves the rule - it’s such an exceptional project in the modern sense that its presence highlights the absence of others.
I suppose things like the Svalbard seed vault are similar secular efforts, as is the Long Now’s clock, although that feels somewhat more self-indulgent than these others. I’m interested in others, if you can think of them.
I do agree with you over all, but I am not certain it's outside the capacity of modern society. You only need to look at the group in France[0] where they are building a medieval castle using only period appropriate tools and techniques. It is more of a research project than an act of devotion, but I think it demonstrates that we are still capable of such acts.
We have time/energy/money in amounts heretofore not available to us. It's a question of motivation and the culture that produces it. If society's highest common good and life's highest aspirations are materialistic and consumerist, then where does something like this fit in? What for? It becomes a nice curiosity and a tourist stop at best and that's not much much of a motive.
No, we prefer to spend all our time/energy/money on lesser things.
You indeed do, and I support that. I wonder, though - setting aside the catholic notion of God and the associated church embedded in this project, how do you think of future generations? How do you think about things beyond yourself? How do you consider the impacts of your actions on the future?
I’m not being facetious with these questions, nor am I making an accusation - I think it’s a genuinely interesting question for the modern world, and it’s what I’m circling around here more than the notion of glorying god: the cathedral was a gift to the humans of future generations, one whose sacrifice indicated the value its makers placed on the wellbeing of its recipients. How do you think of your actions in that light? Do you?
It's not an accident that the architecture of the Canadian National Gallery explicitly references Christian church architecture.
Or the Smithsonian. Or the NASA museum at Cape Canaveral. Also cathedrals.
Walking the entire length of a Saturn V rocket laid on its side at the NASA museum at Cape Canaveral is as close to a holy moment as this old atheist has ever experienced.
There is a balance. I've seen old houses - they look pretty, but as an engineer they suck. Terrible insulation, bad (ergonomic) layout... Plenty of useless features - who needs cable TV or phone jacks these days...
Which means there needs to be a balance - looks nice enough for today, but don't think for a moment it will meet the needs of the future so it needs to be easy to replace as well.
There’s a balance, sure - I’m asking you what you put on the long side of the ledger.
Regarding houses - American architecture starting around the 40s divorced itself from its locale, but a great deal of older houses were built to be long-term dwellings, and this is reflected in their architecture, where they sit, how the wind and sun move across the structure, the materials they use, etc in a way that still generates value today. They may be harder to run a CAT5 through, but they’re a hell of a lot easier to keep cool in the summer.
Not that I disagree, but I want to confirm: you are suggesting the reason (or one of the reasons) they chose to do stone carving, as opposed to some other form of monastic pursuit, was because it took a lot of time and effort?
A great deal of monastic pursuit was in the interest of slowing down, focusing, applying one’s entire self to something, and recognizing the greatness of god and creation, so yes, anything that encouraged focus and contemplation would have been privileged on those merits.
> But I can’t help but feel like they’ve created a facsimile of a cathedral - they’ve created the palace at Disneyland, not Versailles.
You could at least compare to Notre Dame. It’s a bit tone deaf to draw comparison to Versailles, which was a vanity project to glorify the French monarchy.
There are other options that are - unfortunately - more likely. Historically the clergy was only a small fraction of the total number of excess males removed.
>"Concretely it absorbed an excess of male heirs so they could live a comfy life and would not try an hostile takeover over their elder brothers' state."
That was often a consequence, but in general it provided an alternative pathway to male success in life and a means of advancing through a respected status hierarchy that did not depend on the traditional markers. Something sorely lacking today, when even outside the question of inheritance you are faced with the near impossibility of achieving the economically independent and socially valuable life that your grandfather or father had by simply working.
There are plenty of people who do achieve an economically independent and socially valuable life.
Those that don't most often have decided to set an unrealistic definition of economically independent and socially valuable life. Their grandfathers never had it that definition, but they somehow think their grandfathers never struggled and otherwise had it a lot easier than their grandfathers really did.
there is a second group that has decided it is impossible, and thus refuse to try.
Don't get me wrong, bad luck happens to everybody. Most don't get luck so bad they can't recover though. Some get worse luck than others.
In general set reasonable goals and you can achieve them.
>"Their grandfathers never had it that definition, but they somehow think their grandfathers never struggled and otherwise had it a lot easier than their grandfathers really did."
I don't think it's that they think they never struggled. It's that the struggle resulted in something. Work hard, because it will probably earn you a promotion. Put a little extra on the mortgage every month, because you might be able to pay it off one day. Save a bit for your kids college, because then they'll be able to afford it. All of these things are practically quaint at this point. Some people can pull it off, but it's the exceptional case now, not the median as it once was. Increasingly you need a 90th percentile 21st century income to get a 50th percentile 20th century life.
As far back as ancient Egypt, grids and measuring tools were used to reproduce figures at different scales. Roman workshops churned out copies of Greek statues in marble and bronze, using casts and moulds. From the 18th century onwards, sculptors used outright pointing machines to transfer models into marble. James Watt, the steam engine guy, even built a mechanical sculpture-copying machine that could (somewhat) automatically reproduce reliefs and medallions.
Gothic architectural decoration wasn't about expressing the inner world of its makers in the way we think of art today. Much of it was produced by large masonry workshops using standardized geometry, wooden templates and repeated designs.
So, yeah, using a CNC machine is truly Gothic.
However there is the concept of 'the resistance of the material' where the act of working with the material with bare hands and simple tools is a meditative process. Something I would have thought applicable to the contemplative and monastical life of a monk.
There's a fascinating article from BBC 4 on the topic https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000xqt
I'm short, it's artistic boilerate with no meaningful value to either the artist or the viewer.
> Ornate pieces that used to take months for a skilled carver, now can be accomplished in a matter of days. Instead of cutting out the beauty, using the excuse that it takes too long, thus doesn’t fit into the budget, modern technology can be used to make true Gothic in all its beauty a reality again today.
The options are either use the best tool for the job, or don't do the job at all because the budget (time or monetary I'm not sure) is not there.
That said, actual Gothic sculpture and decoration fell into that gap when pointing was lost. And the frankly lower quality of most medieval sculpture more or less reflects that. And anyway, nothing wrong with neo-Gothic.
[0]: https://www.monumentallabs.co/
EDIT: Actually, it’s a mix of CNC roughing to shape the stone, followed by manual finishing. According to the Sagrada Família’s website, this allows each stone to remain a unique piece of craftsmanship while significantly speeding up the process.
E.g. https://x.com/Monumental_Labs/status/2102775795689419214?a=x...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robot-role-marble-art-sculpting...
There's this insistence that forms have to be "honest", so ornamental facades are out. Any attempt to revive a form is called "pastiche" (except modernist, which...uh, has been around for awhile now!). People always insist on "deconstruction" and "contrast" so they can never just build a rowhouse that looks like the other rowhouses. Etc.
There's study after study that shows that regular people are way more inclined to let things get built if it just looks good, and when people are presented with choices they'll basically always pick the classic-looking building. And yet we never seem to get them.
The more charitable read is that cost is part of the equation and people don't want to pay it, but that's 100% not the whole story. (Another part of the story is that people who buy the plans care the most about internal space with tons of light coming in, which probably drives a bunch of decisions on the outside.)
The elites like things the masses dislike as a way to signal their social distances from the masses. By designing a building that conforms to their elite taste at the expense of nearly everyone else who has to look at the thing, it reinforces their power and control over the space.
It's the moral equivalent of buying a beachfront property and blasting noise every morning from a giant PA system just so that everyone trying to just relax on the beach knows who is really in charge.
I have a rule of thumb that seems to hold: until you get to about 3500 sq feet in a house people will choose larger over decorations where possible. Larger than that and you don't want to clean the house yourself (that is unless your wealth supports regular professional cleaning you won't go much larger). Of course as a rule of thumb it isn't a hard rule, some people want more space, others can live with less. As houses get larger people are willing for more decoration cost.
For apartments it is worse - renters rarely will pay extra to live in a nice building.
But they will make your life better.
This just sounds like some whiggish defense of modernism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime
Up until the late 1800s, beauty was expensive. Therefore, it was a costly (i.e., believable) signal of wealth, status, and taste. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, modern manufacturing got going and made beauty cheap. The ornate wrought iron door that took some workman hundreds of hours to produce was a good signal. Now, a cast simulacrum can be made at scale and ordinary people can have beautiful doors.
This led the tastemaker art and architecture elite to start playing a kind of inside baseball where what's "beautiful" isn't beautiful in some objective sense, or to ordinary people, it's just what's trendy within their clique at a given time.
(and, to head you off at the pass: you may like brutalism or Obama's library, but the data clearly show that regular people do not)
See Tom Wolfe's excellent From Bauhaus to Our House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
Also this ACX discussion (it's a few posts) is really good: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-everyone-on-taste https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/three-model-organisms-for-t...
We should really do something about this. Buildings affect everyone around them, and we should force people designing them to make buildings that regular people find beautiful.
These people are trying: https://www.humanise.org/
> This led the tastemaker art and architecture elite to start playing a kind of inside baseball where what's "beautiful" isn't beautiful in some objective sense, or to ordinary people, it's just what's trendy within their clique at a given time.
I don't find "gothic" design beautiful though I can recognize the skill and devotion it represents; I do love shaker and bauhaus and scandi design. There is no "objective sense" when it comes to beauty.
I think you could rephrase this as "where what's beautiful is no longer determined by the amount of skill and effort to construct it", which I think is also true but also more meaningful and much more accomodating to the range of actual "ordinary people's" tastes ...
However, while you may be correct that the range of opinions among "regular people" encompasses people who like Bauhaus or brutalism, it is important to acknowledge that such people are the minority (and, fair to add "by far" in most settings).
https://www.civicart.org/americans-preferred-architecture-fo... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249624309_Physical_... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026427512...
etc. etc. etc...
https://www.ocarm.org/en/item/4545-st-john-of-the-cross-myst...
It may seem from our perspective that monasteries are full of prayer and spiritual endeavors, but they are also the site of a large amount of manual labor and highly-educated expertise that can be brought to bear on large projects like this.
A gothic cathedral is both an incredible work of art and also the work of hundreds or thousands of hands over decades and centuries - you are looking not just at the final product, but at the love and commitment it took to make that work of art, the long-term dedication and belief that it should exist even if we don’t live to see it exist. You’re looking at an expression of love not just for God and for art and beauty, but for future generations and people we’ll never know. The time and effort isn’t an unfortunate part of the process, it’s intrinsic to what we feel when we witness the cathedral - a connection to others, reaching both ways.
I understand why the monks have developed this technique, and I don’t disagree with them - the act of building a gothic cathedral is outside the capacity of modern society. I’ll never begrudge someone a hack to preserve some beauty in this machine we’ve created. But I can’t help but feel like they’ve created a facsimile of a cathedral - they’ve created the palace at Disneyland, not Notre Dame.
Perhaps a few dead bodies and a couple hundred years of recitations will do the trick?
Put another way, if monks in the year 1k had a CNC router like this, they wouldn’t have peasants take 50 years to arrive at their expression to God.
It’s the architecture and the design that reflects the Lord almighty. The peasants doing it are a means to an end: so the church stands tall, so they can massacre the non-believers, burn witches, infidels, and imprison astronomers. All in the comfort of a beautiful cathedral.
And, to your point, yes, if the monks followed the construction with a hundred years of prayer and sacrifice to consecrate the building, indeed the building would carry a more powerful emotional resonance than it does now. The sacrifice is the point, the effort is the point. It’s an act of devotion, not just one of construction.
I realize most folks here have a different world view; but in the end, this building has no point whatsoever apart from how the monks see it.
And - “this building has no point whatsoever apart from how the monks see it” is true for everything and every viewpoint.
If we want to protect historic buildings for generations to enjoy then we're going to need to be more pragmatic.
I have come to the conclusion that if it is worth protecting you can see it in tourist numbers - people who go out of their way to look at something.
Even with the CNC machines, this is still a multi-decade endeavor that will span generations because the number of monks (and outside support) is small and not getting larger. They've scaled down the work required to match their capabilities, and still creating something that will last centuries. Relative to their community, it's still a cathedral effort.
I suppose things like the Svalbard seed vault are similar secular efforts, as is the Long Now’s clock, although that feels somewhat more self-indulgent than these others. I’m interested in others, if you can think of them.
Started in 1907, finished in 1990. I don't love it as much as Sagrada Familia, but it is a pretty bona fide classic cathedral.
[0] https://www.guedelon.fr/en/
No, we prefer to spend all our time/energy/money on lesser things.
I’m not being facetious with these questions, nor am I making an accusation - I think it’s a genuinely interesting question for the modern world, and it’s what I’m circling around here more than the notion of glorying god: the cathedral was a gift to the humans of future generations, one whose sacrifice indicated the value its makers placed on the wellbeing of its recipients. How do you think of your actions in that light? Do you?
It's not an accident that the architecture of the Canadian National Gallery explicitly references Christian church architecture.
Or the Smithsonian. Or the NASA museum at Cape Canaveral. Also cathedrals.
Walking the entire length of a Saturn V rocket laid on its side at the NASA museum at Cape Canaveral is as close to a holy moment as this old atheist has ever experienced.
Which means there needs to be a balance - looks nice enough for today, but don't think for a moment it will meet the needs of the future so it needs to be easy to replace as well.
Regarding houses - American architecture starting around the 40s divorced itself from its locale, but a great deal of older houses were built to be long-term dwellings, and this is reflected in their architecture, where they sit, how the wind and sun move across the structure, the materials they use, etc in a way that still generates value today. They may be harder to run a CAT5 through, but they’re a hell of a lot easier to keep cool in the summer.
do you know that (a) the designers of those cathedrals actually thought that? (b) the the people who built those cathedreals actually thought that?
You could at least compare to Notre Dame. It’s a bit tone deaf to draw comparison to Versailles, which was a vanity project to glorify the French monarchy.
1. Loads of pent up historic demand 2. Work is complex, sensitive and physical. 3. There's more history every day!
The church historically absorbed excess males in this way and gave them a dignified purpose in life, it's not a crazy thought at all.
That was often a consequence, but in general it provided an alternative pathway to male success in life and a means of advancing through a respected status hierarchy that did not depend on the traditional markers. Something sorely lacking today, when even outside the question of inheritance you are faced with the near impossibility of achieving the economically independent and socially valuable life that your grandfather or father had by simply working.
Those that don't most often have decided to set an unrealistic definition of economically independent and socially valuable life. Their grandfathers never had it that definition, but they somehow think their grandfathers never struggled and otherwise had it a lot easier than their grandfathers really did.
there is a second group that has decided it is impossible, and thus refuse to try.
Don't get me wrong, bad luck happens to everybody. Most don't get luck so bad they can't recover though. Some get worse luck than others.
In general set reasonable goals and you can achieve them.
I don't think it's that they think they never struggled. It's that the struggle resulted in something. Work hard, because it will probably earn you a promotion. Put a little extra on the mortgage every month, because you might be able to pay it off one day. Save a bit for your kids college, because then they'll be able to afford it. All of these things are practically quaint at this point. Some people can pull it off, but it's the exceptional case now, not the median as it once was. Increasingly you need a 90th percentile 21st century income to get a 50th percentile 20th century life.
Meanwhile plenty of people (though a minority) are doing it right now.