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
> 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.
I'm short, it's artistic boilerate with no meaningful value to either the artist or the viewer.
Wood working projects get out of hand when you add a small feature. I cannot imaging what would happen if you had to do this with stone carving!
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.
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.)
However, there is a divide between vernacular and classical architecture. Vernacular is utilitarian and it is what most people build (you build your house to serve your needs) while classical is not only utilitarian but also communicates a message (authority in gov. buildings).
Most people find vernacular architecture pretty. For example, Florence, San Miguel de Allende, New Orleans, etc. All of them have different architecture caused by the locally available materials and the weather of the place. Contrary to popular belief most of their 'beauty' doesn't come from an old appreciation of the arts people, instead these buildings only met the needs with what was available and worked best.
For example, in the north of Mexico houses were built with thick limestone ('sillar de caliche'). The thickness helped as insulation (hot weather). The limestone was plastered with 'cal' in a light color with an 'aborregado' finish that helped reflect the sunlight thus keeping the house cooler. The houses were tall because hot air rises, windows looked almost like doors because people opened them during the night to let the air in. The buildings are beautiful but they are extremely utilitarian. Nowadays most houses in Mexico are built with cement and rebar, which is ugly.
The architect Leon Krier made the argument that all of this was a 20th century phenomenon caused by industrialization and fossil fuel dependency, which has not only affected buildings but how cities get built (urban planning). He believed this would end once fossil fuels reservoirs decreased.
But modern architecture being bland and non-decorative? You can lay the majority of the blame for that on building owners.
My partner works for a building engineering firm that is hired by architects and building owners, and we both are not fond of modern architectural trends and have discussed it at length.
In short, buildings have two scenarios - one, the person or company paying for the building plans on keeping it over the next decade plus, or two, the buyer plans on flipping the building as soon as possible.
In the first case, and extremely so in the second, buyers are entirely without taste and despise spending any money that they don't absolutely have to. The desire to min/max buildings has led to function over form to the point of nearly ignoring form.
"Cheap" is the top priority, followed closely by "inoffensive to the people we want to rent this to / flip this to". This results in cheap, low effort facades and an absolute minimum of permanent decorative elements.
Buildings are seen as short term (10 years or less) consumable items, and nothing endures long enough to make it seem worthwhile to buyers to put any money towards design excellence.
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.
In the end, the construction industry is really a deciding factor : you only see, as a classic survivorship bias phenomena, what the best building with all the money in the world looked like, ie cathedrals, palaces, and expect every building to have the same standard today. It is not realistic, nor responsible. Cheap building for the masses have always been the norm!
I would call this a false dilemma. There are a bunch of examples in Manhattan of beautiful facades that are extremely ornate but are painted cast iron. It does not have to be styrofoam.
>I'd rather be paying for what I consider important for a building (longevity, ecology and thermal efficiency) than some esthetical addendum
First of all, I'm not even sure that modern buildings achieve these goals.
Like you are saying, you are speaking of cheap buildings for the masses. And a sibling comment talks about how people only look at the bottom line. If a building is beautiful, it is loved; if it is loved, it is more likely to remain. And a building that remains is best for ecology.
And also, buildings are not just for the owners, they are public works, and should be designed as such. An "esthetical addendum" is not mere vanity, it is an important contributor to quality of life in a city.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
love it
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.
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.