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taylorfinley 5 minutes ago [-]
This reminds me of the Hindu monastery on Kauai, where the monks have a laser cutter [0], they use it to make merch for the gift shop.
I believe the temple on Kauai is hand-carved, but I enjoy the contrast of monastic orders using CAD/CAM tooling. It makes perfect sense when you think of the cutting-edge tech it required to make an illuminated manuscript, for example. I suspect there have always been hacker/nerd types among those groups.
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.
So, yeah, using a CNC machine is truly Gothic.
radiorental 15 hours ago [-]
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 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.
wolframhempel 14 hours ago [-]
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...
noosphr 13 hours ago [-]
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.
knicholes 15 hours ago [-]
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.
wduquette 15 hours ago [-]
Who's to say they don't? I'd guess the monks are using CNC for standard elements, while statuary is done by hand. (Though possibly not by the monks.)
13 hours ago [-]
mgr86 14 hours ago [-]
I have a fascination 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.
taion 15 hours ago [-]
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.
One of the interpretations of the poem is that it criticises organised religion and that the mills in question are the church as an organisation represented in concrete terms by the church buildings.
contingencies 10 hours ago [-]
I think they moved them to Canary Wharf and covered them in glass.
ghm2199 10 hours ago [-]
100% with you on effort reduction. I was making closets at home and was doing pilot holes for attaching the back 1/4" plywood. I calculated I had to do 50 odd holes for all of them. Then i discovered the brad stapler gun(all electric) and I was done in 5 mins what would have taken an hour to get right with a jig.
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!
drummojg 14 hours ago [-]
For example, Rodin had it figured out. He just hired more sculptors!
cellsstudio 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah 100%. Also the digital work is 100% craft.
I used to work in architecture and CNC was always seen as a powerful fabrication tool for installations and temporary structures.
To see it working in stone, and to see it creating classical motifs, is genuinely inspiring. Incredible use of technology here and am still blown away by the craft required to model this out, knowing how the stone is going to respond when cut.
soci 15 hours ago [-]
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.
1-more 14 hours ago [-]
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.
jdboyd 10 hours ago [-]
I think that is more for space/budget reasons than really being a preferred way to work. One thing is handy for is being able to carve something in place though. I saw someone use it to do inlays in the middle of a large plank tabletop that would have required a truly huge CNC machine to be able to hold the plank.
5 hours ago [-]
lefstathiou 15 hours ago [-]
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.
The chapter house look amazing. I look forward to what the library would look like.
ricardobeat 16 hours ago [-]
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.
weirdish 16 hours ago [-]
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!
Brendinooo 14 hours ago [-]
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.)
vintermann 15 minutes ago [-]
Regular people may like it... But judging from real estate prices around where I live, the richer people are, the more they seem to want to live in modernist birdhouse style houses.
uriegas 11 hours ago [-]
The arts have always been influenced by the philosophy of their time.
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.
Brendinooo 8 hours ago [-]
I agree with you about the vernacular thing, and a note that it does sort of contribute to its own beauty intrinsically because there is a harmonizing design language across any particular area in a variety that goes from place to place and even complements its environs
LinuxAmbulance 12 hours ago [-]
Modern architecture ideology is hilarious from an outsider's perspective.
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.
tdeck 3 hours ago [-]
I remember hearing on some podcast years ago that thanks to HGTV everyone started painting their houses white or beige, because they saw on reality TV shows that that made the house easier to sell. What you're describing sounds like a scaled up version of that.
munificent 13 hours ago [-]
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.
vinaigrette 12 hours ago [-]
The whole point of architects from the get-go is to have somebody design something different from what the masses have !
vinaigrette 12 hours ago [-]
A friend of mine wrote about neo-pastiche in Plessis-Robinson, France in Archiscopie magazine. He showed me very impressive images of styrofoam shaped as greek, roman and hausmannian elements sprayed with a cheap render slapped on a concrete building that end up gentrifying neighborhoods. Perhaps a low quality, poorly performing, ecologically irresponsible building is what you want ? I'd rather be paying for what I consider important for a building (longevity, ecology and thermal efficiency) than some esthetical addendum.
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!
Brendinooo 11 hours ago [-]
>Perhaps a low quality, poorly performing, ecologically irresponsible building is what you want ?
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.
toddmorey 16 hours ago [-]
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.
bluGill 16 hours ago [-]
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.
anon291 14 hours ago [-]
> but they won't increase the value of the house.
But they will make your life better.
bluGill 14 hours ago [-]
Will they? That is arguable at best. I've tore a lot of things out of my house because they were stupid dust collectors that made my life worse.
anon291 13 hours ago [-]
Yes. Aesthetic things are good for the soul in subtle ways. It's like making a split pea soup without a bay leaf. You wouldn't be able to figure it out, but you know something is missing and it makes most people sad even if they can't identify it.
sagarm 5 hours ago [-]
You still decorate the interior. It's just more of a blank slate to work with.
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)
lo_zamoyski 15 hours ago [-]
That's not true at all. You can clearly see vacillation between more elaborate and simpler architectural forms throughout history.
This just sounds like some whiggish defense of modernism.
nnnnico 14 hours ago [-]
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
NoImmatureAdHom 15 hours ago [-]
I think a good theory is:
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 ...
NoImmatureAdHom 14 hours ago [-]
You're right, I was imprecise.
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).
When it comes to subjectivity, I am not a majoritarian. I would go even further: I do not care what the majority thinks. Furthermore, I think this is a vital element of a free and vibrant society.
NoImmatureAdHom 7 hours ago [-]
I agree.
However, what we have is a situation where, what, 90+% of big or public buildings are "modern architecture". The people who are paying for them and/or the people for whom they are built think they are ugly. We're trapped in this bad local equilibrium.
If there were some sort of agreement in a group of people about what they want, and then they build it, and it's "modern architecture" - that would be fine. But that's not where we are. It's more like the tastemakers have a stranglehold on the rest of us.
gosub100 14 hours ago [-]
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.
sarchertech 9 hours ago [-]
You could probably get something that looks very close by 3d printing forms and casting it in tinted concrete.
walrus01 8 hours ago [-]
> I've always wondered why we haven't seen a broad architectural movement returning to highly ornate decorative facades
If you follow trends in USA single family detached home construction, the trend is rather the opposite direction. Extreme rises in inflation generally, price of vehicles, construction materials are sending house builders down paths of using the cheapest, shoddiest possible materials and then slapping a veneer of normalcy on top of it. The amount of MDF and oriented strand board in use is greater than it's ever been. Now they're going back to aluminum wiring, copper clad aluminum cat5e cable, and similar. You should see the horrific results of a framing inspection (pre-drywall) done by a professional, neutral and diligent inspector in the average single family home tract development these days.
Modern "Architecture" has taken the trends of the mid-late 1990s McManson to its ultimate extreme of building "luxury" housing that is in reality anything but. Just good enough to sell, then the shoddiness in construction and maintenance becomes somebody else's problem.
VoodooJuJu 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
vessenes 17 hours ago [-]
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?
eucryphia 56 minutes ago [-]
Fantastic!
Less brutalism and more classicism.
yendor44 17 hours ago [-]
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.
erickhill 5 hours ago [-]
Man, I would love to get a replacement gear for my early days electronic eject external Macintosh 3.5" floppy drive made in stone instead of plastic. Heck yeah!
clarkmoody 13 hours ago [-]
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).
Man, I really hope that eventually this technology will allow us to build beautiful housing again.
tryptophan 9 hours ago [-]
I'm very surprised there is no monk order focusing on technology and programming, in a similar vein to how these guys do a lot of building. There is no reason that Catholic church shouldn't have its own holy Linux distro, social media site, streaming site, etc...
mensetmanusman 5 hours ago [-]
Tolkien portrayed the Church as Ents for a reason. Had they started any of these, AI would have made the effort possibly wasted. All of this tech stuff is day one for the oldest organization in history.
roughly 16 hours ago [-]
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.
whatthejesus 16 hours ago [-]
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.
roughly 15 hours ago [-]
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.
wduquette 15 hours ago [-]
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.
roughly 13 hours ago [-]
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.
venzaspa 16 hours ago [-]
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.
bluGill 15 hours ago [-]
Most buildings are not historic. Protecting everything ruins the value for things that are worth protecting.
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.
roughly 15 hours ago [-]
Like I said, I’m not mad at the monks for this, and I’ll never be mad at someone for creating more powerful means of expressing beauty.
shellfishgene 15 hours ago [-]
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.
roughly 15 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
zehaeva 16 hours ago [-]
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 don't lack the ability. We lack the time/energy/money (these are all the same thing!).
zehaeva 13 hours ago [-]
And yet a bunch of volunteers have spent nearly 30 years now building a castle.
bluGill 13 hours ago [-]
There is no universal. The existence of exceptions in no way says anything about anyone else.
roughly 12 hours ago [-]
And, 30 years is impressive, but it’s one lifetime.
lo_zamoyski 15 hours ago [-]
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.
bluGill 15 hours ago [-]
That is your personal judgement that those things are lesser. I reserve the right to disagree.
roughly 15 hours ago [-]
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.
bluGill 14 hours ago [-]
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.
roughly 13 hours ago [-]
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.
PaulDavisThe1st 14 hours ago [-]
> the cathedral was a gift to the humans of future generations
do you know that (a) the designers of those cathedrals actually thought that? (b) the the people who built those cathedreals actually thought that?
roughly 13 hours ago [-]
Yes. All of the writing at the time indicates this was the case.
tantalor 16 hours ago [-]
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?
roughly 15 hours ago [-]
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.
13 hours ago [-]
throwaway219450 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
roughly 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that’s fair, updated.
fatbird 13 hours ago [-]
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.
roughly 7 hours ago [-]
Hm, that’s a fair note, and you’re right, that changes the flavor here.
opengrass 16 hours ago [-]
For a second I thought the guy at the computer is the CNC statue.
Brendinooo 14 hours ago [-]
I would love to see a statue of a guy designing the statue at the computer
MisterMunchkin 15 hours ago [-]
It would be fun to be able to order custom stone statues or artwork made like this.
sroussey 15 hours ago [-]
I've been watching these robots carve stone on instagram for years now...
Bunch of dudes, on mission, hardcore, locked in, and grinding. No pun intended.
ButlerianJihad 15 hours ago [-]
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.
1-more 13 hours ago [-]
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!
fnord77 12 hours ago [-]
cybermonks of wyoming
love it
Fricken 12 hours ago [-]
Reddit Cofounder Alexis Ohanian has a startup, Monumental Labs, which is applying robotic milling to stonework. The finishing process is still done by hand and appears quite labour intensive
... 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?
pixl97 16 hours ago [-]
We should all be into consensual numerical control.
SoMomentary 15 hours ago [-]
Oh jeez, this explains a lot of the funny looks I get when I tell people I'm building a CNC machine in my garage with belts and pipes and such.
pavel_lishin 14 hours ago [-]
If you're ever feeling weird about it, don't forget that you can always use CBT!
16 hours ago [-]
dyauspitr 17 hours ago [-]
When AI wipes out programming jobs over the next few years, do you think we will see a revival in the number of young men going into monkhood?
Oarch 17 hours ago [-]
I think robotically driven historic building renovation is one of the safest jobs.
1. Loads of pent up historic demand
2. Work is complex, sensitive and physical.
3. There's more history every day!
jacquesm 16 hours ago [-]
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.
ramesh31 16 hours ago [-]
>"When AI wipes out programming jobs over the next few years, do you think we will see a revival in the number of young men going into monkhood?"
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.
Maken 16 hours ago [-]
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.
ramesh31 16 hours ago [-]
>"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.
rerdavies 13 hours ago [-]
I just finished reading a biography of Christopher Marlowe, which I would not otherwise recommend. However, one of the interesting issues it discusses is how English universities in late 16th century provided an illusion of upward mobility for scholarship students, while actually only providing a path to clergy positions in remote parishes that no sensible second son of an aristocrat would find remotely acceptable. Not unlike the "American Dream", in many ways: a false promise held out to keep the masses complacent.
bluGill 15 hours ago [-]
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.
rerdavies 13 hours ago [-]
That is indeed the myth that the 1% would have you believe. It is, however, probably good that you have realized that you must moderate your expectations.
bluGill 13 hours ago [-]
1% perhaps - but I've seen it all over in all income levels, and it is still working for those who try.
ramesh31 15 hours ago [-]
>"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.
bluGill 14 hours ago [-]
There is the second group thinking: it must not be possible so don't try.
Meanwhile plenty of people (though a minority) are doing it right now.
I believe the temple on Kauai is hand-carved, but I enjoy the contrast of monastic orders using CAD/CAM tooling. It makes perfect sense when you think of the cutting-edge tech it required to make an illuminated manuscript, for example. I suspect there have always been hacker/nerd types among those groups.
[0] https://www.himalayanacademy.com/archive-taka-single-post/?t...
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.
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.
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!
I used to work in architecture and CNC was always seen as a powerful fabrication tool for installations and temporary structures.
To see it working in stone, and to see it creating classical motifs, is genuinely inspiring. Incredible use of technology here and am still blown away by the craft required to model this out, knowing how the stone is going to respond when cut.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime
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...
However, what we have is a situation where, what, 90+% of big or public buildings are "modern architecture". The people who are paying for them and/or the people for whom they are built think they are ugly. We're trapped in this bad local equilibrium.
If there were some sort of agreement in a group of people about what they want, and then they build it, and it's "modern architecture" - that would be fine. But that's not where we are. It's more like the tastemakers have a stranglehold on the rest of us.
If you follow trends in USA single family detached home construction, the trend is rather the opposite direction. Extreme rises in inflation generally, price of vehicles, construction materials are sending house builders down paths of using the cheapest, shoddiest possible materials and then slapping a veneer of normalcy on top of it. The amount of MDF and oriented strand board in use is greater than it's ever been. Now they're going back to aluminum wiring, copper clad aluminum cat5e cable, and similar. You should see the horrific results of a framing inspection (pre-drywall) done by a professional, neutral and diligent inspector in the average single family home tract development these days.
Modern "Architecture" has taken the trends of the mid-late 1990s McManson to its ultimate extreme of building "luxury" housing that is in reality anything but. Just good enough to sell, then the shoddiness in construction and maintenance becomes somebody else's problem.
Less brutalism and more classicism.
[0]: https://www.monumentallabs.co/
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.
[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.
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.
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.
love it
https://www.monumentallabs.co/work
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.